Following the rules: consistency in sign.

The majority of hearing-impaired students in the United States are exposed to at least one, if not several, forms of simultaneously signed and spoken English input (e.g., Seeing Essential English, Signing Exact English, Signed/Manual English, or combinations of these systems). It was the purpose of this study to investigate teachers' and interpreters' consistency with regard to following the rules of three of these systems. Subjects were asked to interpret a carefully designed set of stimuli; their performance was videotaped for later bimodal transcription and analysis. Careful descriptive analysis of the form and content of the data revealed that some professionals who purported to use a particular system frequently do not follow accurately the rules of that system, but many can encode in sign the meaning of what they are saying. Signing Exact English (SEE-II) users were able to follow the rules of that system at a significantly higher percentage of time than users of either of the other two systems (p less than .03 and p less than .001). They also were able to encode the meaning in sign of what they were saying an average of 86% of the time--significantly higher than users of Signed/Manual English (p less than .02). However, the average percentage of ability to follow the precise rules of a system was below 57% for even the adults who used SEE-II. It is possible that the acquisition of English is confounded for hearing-impaired children when professionals do not consistently sign the system they purport to use.

Can SEE-2 children understand ASL-using adults?

Signing Exact English or SEE-2, is one of several invented sign systems currently being used with hearing-impaired children in the United States. The system parallels the morphology of written English and differs from American Sign Language both in terms of the configuration of many of the lexical signs and in grammatical word order. The current study investigated whether students accustomed to an invented sign system could comprehend ASL signed by deaf adults. One group of subjects was exposed to SEE-2 in their day school classrooms. The other group attended residential programs and was exposed to Signed English, PSE and ASL. Both groups observed three videotaped short stories and answered questions following each. Both groups answered approximately 25 percent of the written comprehension questions correctly; their mean scores did not differ significantly. Results of the study suggest that students exposed to SEE-2 and lacking experiences with deaf adults were able to comprehend ASL as well as their peers who attended residential schools.

Providing the support services needed by students who are deaf or hard of hearing.

When students who are deaf or hard of hearing are appropriately placed, program-level and curriculum-level adaptations may both need to be discussed to ensure social as well as academic progress. Programmatic modifications may involve communication, linguistic, and grading issues, and both the listening and physical settings. Curricular modifications may involve the classroom structure, rapport and affect, the instructional format and language, the lesson format and materials, comprehension monitoring, activity and assignment completion, and placement choices. Professionals should work cooperatively to make and monitor changes.

Research-based language intervention strategies adapted for deaf and hard of hearing children.

Strategies found to facilitate the language development of young, hearing children are reviewed in this paper, and adaptations and examples for use with deaf and hard-of-hearing children are provided as alternatives to simply advising professionals and parents to increase the quantity of conversation with these children. It is suggested that adults accelerate the language acquisition of deaf and hard-of-hearing students by capitalizing on the linguistic opportunities provided in particular environments, rearranging environments, being responsive to indications that children have comprehended messages and are open to risk communication, and specifically by intervening on form, content, and use skills. The author challenges professionals to document empirically the usefulness of each language intervention technique presented here.

Social interaction. Assessment and intervention with regard to students who are deaf.

Personnel in school settings where deaf children are enrolled can play an important role in facilitating the acquisition of mature social skills. Social interaction assessment, curricula, and examples of goals and objectives are provided in this article as well as suggestions for facilitating social integration and developing a Circle of Friends. A tool that interpreters or other significant adults might utilize to empower hearing peers is also provided. It can be used for assessment purposes or as a model for appropriate comments. Finally, six commercially-available social skills curricula are described for use with students who are deaf.

Parents' use of Signing Exact English: a descriptive analysis.

Parental use of simultaneous communication is advocated by many programs serving hearing-impaired students. The purpose of the present study was to describe in detail the input characteristics of five hearing parents, who were attempting to use one such system, Signing Exact English or SEE 2 (Gustason, Pfetzing, & Zawolkow, 1980). The parents were intermediate-level signers, motivated to use SEE 2. Voiced and signed segments from videotaped language samples were transcribed and coded for equivalence and other features of interest. Results were that parents' signed mean lengths of utterance (MLUs) were lower than those of their children although the majority of their sign utterances were syntactically intact. Structures categorized as complex in the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure (Lee, 1974) and considered abstract in a semantic coding scheme (Lahey, 1988) were seldom used by the parents. Parents provided a narrow range of lexical items in their sign code. Results are discussed in terms of the type of input the parents are providing and the procedures used to identify priorties for parent education.

A history of seeing essential English (SEE I).

Over the past 30 years, several Manual Codes on English have been developed in the United States. Unlike American Sign Language, which is a language independent of English, manual codes of English were designed to specifically reflect English and are signed in English word order. The first such system to appear during this time frame was Seeing Essential English (SEE I), developed by David Anthony, a deaf educator of the deaf. Today most educational programs for the deaf use Signing Exact English (SEE II) or Signed English and there is confusion about the nature and role of SEE I. This paper is designed to clear up some of the misconceptions that have grown up around SEE I, to provide some historical background about its development, and to review some research findings concerning its effectiveness.

Support and practice of CEASD program standards in one midwestern state.

A questionnaire was written by the first author and used to gather information from school districts and cooperatives in Kansas providing programming for deaf students. Respondents indicated which CEASD standards they believed should be practiced and which CEASD standards they perceived were practiced by their school program. Information was also obtained regarding perceived barriers to the implementation of desirable program standards. Results indicated that the CEASD standards were generally supported, but not generally implemented in most programs in the state. Standards receiving the most support and the least support are delineated in the paper, as are those standards for which there was the greatest disparity between level of support and perceived level of practice. These results are discussed along with implications for addressing needs in deaf education in the country in general. Recommendations for future research are also presented.

Enhancing parents' use of SEE-2. Progress and retention.

This study documented the changes in spoken and signed input of five hearing parents to their hearing-impaired children over a 12-month time period. Two baseline sessions per parent were videotaped and analyzed (Moeller & Luetke-Stahlman, 1990), and then two intervention sessions and one retention session were filmed. Parents were seen individually by one author of this study after each session and given feedback on specific characteristics of their communication abilities. Transcription sheets, graphs, and their child's IEP (Individual Educational Plan) objective were used to help parents target goals for improvement. All parents improved in at least one linguistic area of need, and several parents changed impressively in form, content, and use of Manually Coded English. These improvements allowed the parents to completely and consistently provide comprehensible messages to their children.

Essential practices as adults read to meet the needs of deaf or hard of hearing students.

Most deaf or hard of hearing students do not read proficiently (Karchmer, Milone, & Wolk, 1979; Allen, 1986), yet Winzer (1985) found no agreement as to the best way to teach reading to them. We reviewed the literature in related fields in an attempt to assist teachers and parents in identifying practices that are supported by research and linked to literacy attainment. We were especially impressed by the work of Adams (1990) with regard to the practices that promote proficient reading in hearing students, as well as by that of Hoggan and Strong (1994), who studied the techniques of those working with students with language disabilities. The result of our review was a rationale and description of ten practices that we suggest are essential to include when reading to students if they are to become proficient readers themselves. Our work is particularly applicable when adults are using the methods of read aloud, adult/student shared reading, and adult guided reading. These essential practices can be modeled by teachers for parents and others working with students as they develop reading skills.