The American Sign Language

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The American Sign Language

In the education sector, the stakeholders involved have recently become involved with the welfare of the students and in particular the deaf students. Due to scientific advancements, incorporating English and the American Sign Language would be of great help in improving communication both in school and back at home. It ought to be the responsibility of the respective stakeholder in the deaf child’s life to play a part in ensuring the deaf person gets a good and conducive learning environment. There are different categories of deaf people, which include children born from deaf parents, the individuals who began signing at an early stage in life and individuals who started to sign during their adolescent period and each category has different learning methods from the other (Galvan, 1999).

According to a research carried out, signing was influenced by the period one was exposed to such languages although individuals who began to sign at an early stage in life and those who were born of deaf parents portray a similar use in sign language and display similar learning and comprehending capabilities in terms of the grammatical expressions as per the American Sign Language while comparing to the deaf who learnt the sign language at a much later stage in life (Mayberry, Fischer & Hartfield, 1983). This means signing at a very tender age becomes part and parcel of the deaf person’s life.

The difference comes about in terms of relating the different sign features. Children born from deaf parents grow up learning and comprehending the phoneme as the single most units of communication and they have a problem in advancing their sign morphology because they are taught to use the sign language wholly. They have a tendency to learn the components of a sign but cannot hold on to each and every sign (Galvan, 1999).

A child who begins learning how to sign in school especially at the commencement of their elementary education get to familiarize themselves fast and relate to the different sign languages because their cognitive abilities are not stuck to only one learning process. Their learning tends to advance from the phoneme stage to a more advanced sign language because they are more likely to learn how to analyze the American Sign Language (Galvan, 1999).

The case is diverse for deaf people who began signing at a later stage in life. Taking a look at the brain development of an older child to a younger child, the elder child portrays good signs of better brain development (Galvan, 1999). In reality, an older deaf child finds it hard to comprehend wholly how to sign like the young person because the signing language tends to impair their cognitive judgment in terms of differentiating certain aspects of the sign language. To them differentiating the different sign morphologies has not yet been clearly understood as they tend to take a longer time to differentiate the different signing terms and verbal use (Newport, 1988).

Native signers portray a similar learning skill like the early signers. They tend to gradually conceptualize the development intuition of sign language using either or both analytically and holistic approaches (Newport, 1988). The only problems come in when the early signers and the native signers incorporate a different approach in the signing development especially verbal pronunciation because it brings about major problems in planning for the national curriculum if they are in the same school. A deaf person born of deaf parents will use certain sign language to represent a verb while the early sign learner will incorporate the same sign language to signify a different meaning (Galvan, 1999). It applies the same way to hearing people who learn how to speak English since a native English speaker tends to use certain verbs incorrectly as per the English rules when compared to an individual learning English in school.

Signing between the deaf improves with years of experience and signing. People who have signed for a long time show more signing expressions, which tend to show how much they conceptualize information unlike the early sign learners who tend to fall short of understanding the signing process and techniques.

References

Galvan, D. (1999). Differences in the use of American Sign Language Morphology by Deaf Children: Implications for Parents and Teachers. Retrieved December 04, 2012, from HYPERLINK “http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10561870” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10561870

Mayberry, R., Fischer, S. & Hartfield, C. (1983). Sentence Repetition in American Sign Language. London: Croom Helm

Newport. F. (1988). Constraints on Learning and their Role in Language Acquisition: Studies of the Acquisition of American Sign Language. Retrieved December 04, 2012, from HYPERLINK “http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0388000188900101” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0388000188900101