Signed English in the classroom, II. Structural and pragmatic aspects of teachers' speech and sign

Abstract

In the first paper in this series (S.E.C. I) we investigated the effects of teaching style on pupil participation in discourse in classrooms where Signed English (S.E.) was employed for communication. In the present paper, we analyse the same classroom conversations from a different perspective. We present analyse of aspects of the grammatical complexity and completeness of teacher speech. We find no evidence to suggest that the simultaneous use of sign language disrupts the grammatical well-formedness of teacher utterances but, through comparisons with the speech of teachers in oral classrooms, find that signing appears to reduce the incidence of complex clause structures in teacher communication.As in previous studies, we find that the complexity of teacher speech to deaf children does not vary significantly as a function of child age (or hearing loss or non-verbal IQ). Counter-intuitively, we also find that teachers who use most complex language are faced with children who show least signs of misunderstanding. The educational implications of this finding are discussed in relation to previous studies of hearing and orally educated deaf children. Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analyses are used to explore relationships between teaching style, grammatical complexity and child performance. The implications of the resultant findings for hypotheses about the impact of the use of signs on communication with deaf children are explored.Further use of MLR procedures reveals that the relations between teaching style and child participation are largely independent of the frequency of teacher signing.