Signing Judaism: Moses Mendelssohn’s “Living Script” and Deaf/Jewish Emancipation

Looking across the Hearing Line?: Exploring Young Deaf People’s Use of Web 2.0

Reviewed by: Sign Language in Action by Jemina Napier and Lorraine Leeson Wanette Reynolds (bio) Sign Language in Action, by Jemina Napier and Lorraine Leeson ( London: Palgrave, 2016, softcover, 339 pages, $39.99, ISBN: 978-1-137-30976-1) Sign Language in Action by Jemina Napier and Lorraine Leeson uniquely charts the field of applied sign language linguistics. This impressive book provides readers with a comprehensive examination of applied sign language linguistics research informed by authors' extensive experience and expertise as sign language interpreters, researchers, and educators. This unprecedented book draws from numerous fields that fall under the umbrella of applied sign language linguistics and is sure to become an essential reader for researchers, educators, and professionals, as well as students of sign language linguistics, sign language interpreting, sign language instruction, Deaf studies, and Deaf education. In chapter 1, the authors provide an introduction that establishes the aim of the book, their intended audiences, and meaning of the title of the book; additionally, the chapter includes a refreshing discussion about the authors' subjectivity, position, and goals as people who can hear working within the field of applied sign language linguistics. They bring an ethnographic approach to this self-examination, emphasizing a strong philosophy of collaboration with the Deaf community, yet at the same time recognizing the privileges that come with being a person who can hear. Subsequent chapters are organized into four main parts. Part 1 lays out key concepts and research issues in chapters 2 and 3; part 2 delves into practical application in chapters 4, 5, and 6; part 3 details research into applied sign linguistics in chapter 7; and part 4 concludes the book with further resources in the field of applied sign language [End Page 666] linguistics in chapter 8. Throughout the book, boxed sections are categorized into case studies, concepts, quotes, and examples. These sections breathe life into concepts found in each chapter, and are sourced from various journal and book publications as well as quotes from websites and self-reports. Chapter 2 provides the background necessary to achieve the title of the chapter, "Understanding Applied Sign Linguistics," by providing a sociocultural perspective to the history of sign languages and deaf communities, and the development of Deaf studies, sign language linguistics, and ultimately to applied sign language linguistics. Chapter 3, "Sign Language in Action," or sign language in use, delves into identity, particularly the relationship between deaf identities and sign language throughout time. The authors also note that deaf communities are comprised of deaf and hearing people who use a sign language and adopt the term signing communities proposed by Bahan and Nash (1995). Although this definition expands the population of study to include hearing people, the authors also recognize further distinctions between those who are Deaf parented or Codas and those who learned a sign language as adults. Contextually, this opens up a wider discussion of signing communities, such as Gallaudet University, and complex relationships of belonging including hearing and deaf interlopers. Using language attitudes as a springboard, current sign language policy and planning is examined internationally in the areas of sign language status and recognition, corpus planning, and educational sign language planning. Chapter 4, "Learning and Teaching Sign Languages," is the first chapter that delves into practical applications. Topics are couched in the context of transmission and detail first and second language acquisition of a sign language, who is a native signer including Deaf and Codas, and non-native deaf signers who acquire a sign language later in life. The second main section of the chapter synthesizes what is currently known about teaching sign languages and the characteristics of successful second language learners of a language in a different modality (i.e., a sign language). The last section reviews current sign language teaching approaches and curricula, evaluations and assessments of sign language learning, and the ways in which efforts are aligned with foreign language teaching. The authors suggest the adoption of [End Page 667] guidelines for foreign language teaching such as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Noijons et al., 2011) be adopted, with such efforts already underway in Europe. They also point out that further research...

Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) is considered to be the native language of many prelingually deaf people in the Netherlands. Although research has provided evidence that sign languages are fully fletched natural languages, many misconceptions still abound about sign languages and deaf people. The low status of sign languages all over the world and the attitude of hearing people towards deaf people and their languages, and the resulting attitude of the deaf towards their own languages, restricted the development of these languages until recently. Due to the poor results of deaf education and the dissatisfaction amongst educators of the deaf, parents of deaf children and deaf people themselves, a change of attitude towards the function of sign language in the interaction with deaf people can be observed; many hearing people dealing with deaf people one way or the other wish to learn the sign language of the deaf community of their country. Many hearing parents of deaf children, teachers of the deaf, student-interpreters and linguists are interested in sign language and want to follow a course to improve their signing ability. In order to develop sign language courses, sign language teachers and teaching materials are needed. And precisely these are missing. This is caused by several factors. First, deaf people in general do not receive the same education as hearing people, due to their inability to learn the spoken language of their environment to such an extent, that they have access to the full eduational program. This prohibits them a.o. to become teachers in elementary and secondary schools, or to become sign language teachers. Althought they are fluent "signers", they lack the competence in the spoken language of their country to obtain a teacher's degree in their sign language. A second problem is caused by the fact, that sign languages are visual languages: no adequate system has yet been found to write down a sign language. So until now hardly any teaching materials were available. Sign language courses should be developed with the help of native signers who should be educated to become language-teachers; with their help and with the help of video-material and computer-software, it will be possible in future to teach sign languages as any other language. But in order to reach this goal, it is imperative that deaf children get a better education so that they can contribute to the emancipation of their language.

Reviewed by: Writing Deafness Carol Padden Christopher Krentz. Writing Deafness. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2007. xiii + 263 pp. Writing Deafness is one of a very few books of its kind that reflects on what “deafness” means in the popular imagination. Recalling Toni Morrison’s call to explore an Africanist presence in American literature (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [1993]), Krentz assigns himself the task of doing the same with deafness. American writers, from the time of early America to the modern literature, have written about deaf people and their condition. What cultural work does “deafness” serve in the writer’s imagination? If blackness positions whiteness, what work does “deafness” do for the American novelist? If deafness is the opposite of “hearing-ness,” or being able to hear, then it should do the same kind of work that blackness does for whiteness—or does it? Krentz carries an authority for pursuing such a project. As he describes himself, he began losing his hearing through childhood and adolescence and is now deaf. Because he has learned American Sign Language (ASL) as an adult and has since lived among signing deaf people, he has inherited their long history in America as well. As a deaf author, the project feels more personal and intimate in his hands. By the first chapter, Krentz has quickly drawn numerous parallels between race and deafness. He evokes W.E.B Du Bois’ notion of a “color line” to argue there is too a “hearing line,” where a real and imagined distance is written into the American experience between those who are hearing and those who are not. The hearing gaze upon the deaf and see in them the promise of their own possibilities. Krentz lays out the history of deaf children in the U.S. from the early nineteenth century through the twentieth to bear out his claim of forced segregation. From the time that the first public school for deaf children was founded in 1817 through the mid twentieth century, when hundreds of residential deaf [End Page 368] schools were built, deaf children spent their lives in the company of other deaf children and hearing caretakers. The history of asylums or institutions for the “deaf and dumb” formed cultures of separation, where deaf children were left by their families to attend school, and then when they left the care of their schools, they remained apart as adults. The use of a sign language, wholly different from speech, further exacerbated this dimension of separation. Hearing people speak; deaf people do not. What changed in the nineteenth century, Krentz says, is that the proliferation of deaf schools and the populations of deaf children brought together because of these schools created a newly visible presence of the deaf, causing deaf and hearing people both to write about their separate and different selves. But is this enough to draw a parallel with blackness? Krentz admits that moving from race to deafness, specifically this type of disability, has its metaphoric limits. Deaf people did not experience the rage and violence that African Americans did; they were not lynched, nor were deaf children who left their deaf schools chased down by mobs. It would not be accurate to describe deaf people’s history as marked by massive acts of pure violence. Instead, deaf people suffered more from the malignancies of indifference and neglect. Their bodies were often experimented upon, including medical acts that can only be called gruesome. They were physically punished for using sign language in schools. Sexual fondling and abuse is disturbingly common in many deaf institutions. Among the earliest documents of one of the first deaf schools in the U.S. is a lengthy investigation by its board of directors into reports that the school’s hearing principal was forcing himself upon deaf women in their rooms. Such acts of violation are persistent even to this day. The attorney-general for the state of Maine released a report in 1982 describing allegations of long-term sexual abuse of deaf teenage boys at the Maine School for the Deaf where a hearing principal was accused of performing acts of sexual bondage on the...

Special Issue:Language Planning and Sign Language Rights Joseph J. Murray (bio) Sign languages exist throughout the world’s societies with varying degrees of acceptance and recognition. Sign languages have emerged as a result of the establishment of schools for deaf people as well as within shared signing communities with sign languages used by both deaf and hearing people. The past half century has witnessed remarkable growth in the academic study of sign languages around the world, an endeavor that has given scientific support to deaf communities’ advocacy for full acceptance of their sign languages by the societies in which they live. Some countries recognize national sign languages in legislation, whereas others do not. Language standardization can threaten sign languages used by a relatively small group of people by favoring a designated “national” sign language or attempts to impose an extranational signed lexicon to take the place of a naturally occurring national sign language (Adam, this volume). The theme of this special issue is “Language Planning and Sign Language Rights.” The six articles in it look at the intersections of language attitudes, public policy, and deaf community discourse at national, regional, and international levels. This is the second special issue of Sign Language Studies on the theme of language planning in sign languages in three years, following an issue in 2012 edited by Josep Quer and Ronice M. de Quadros. This issue comes in the context of widespread interest in sign language rights among academics and within the deaf community. A number of articles on language planning and sign language rights have appeared, as well as two books: Larry Siegel’s The Human Right to Language (2008) and Language Planning [End Page 375] in Sign Languages, by Timothy Reagan (2010), both published by Gallaudet University Press. This interest in sign language rights and sign language planning parallels campaigns by members of deaf communities to use sign language as a means of securing equality for deaf people in the societies in which they live. The late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth saw decades of struggle by organized deaf communities to undo misguided attempts to remove sign language from educational settings for deaf children. As I write in “Linguistic Human Rights Discourses in Deaf Community Activism,” the academic legitimacy conferred by sign language research shaped a new discourse on cultural and linguistic distinctiveness that deaf communities could use to advocate for sign language rights as a means of achieving equality in their societies. The movement for sign language rights has had to overcome the perception of sign languages as not real languages. Verena Krausneker, in “Ideologies and Attitudes toward Sign Languages: An Approximation,” writes that this is one of five ideological constructions that influence this mind-set. Others include the contention that sign languages are of limited value in an ostensibly hearing world, the problem of either/or attitudes of viewing deaf people either as having a disability or as a cultural minority, thereby characterizing both deaf people and sign language as economic burdens. In addition to these four negative frameworks Krausneker suggests that a fifth, positive, attitudinal framework can be found in the concept of Deaf Gain. Robert Adam, in his article, “Standardization of Sign Languages,” explores a particular form of corpus planning with regard to sign languages: language standardization. Although agreeing with previous scholars that such efforts have been led by hearing people or guided by priorities established by them, Adam also notes that some groups of deaf people have been involved in these attempts as well. Adams’s article gives examples of language standardization in Australia, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, and the Arab region. It explores arguments against language standardization by the World Federation of the Deaf and concludes that such efforts should be studied, with careful attention paid to the prime actors and to whether deaf communities’ [End Page 376] primacy in determining the use of their language has been taken into account in the process. A number of countries have recognized sign languages in various ways. Some have done so with a declaration by a government official that the national or regional sign language is indeed a language. Other forms of acknowledgment...

Finally! A Formula for Making Positive Changes in Deaf Education Leala Holcomb (bio) Disabling Pedagogy: Power, Politics, and Deaf Education. Linda R. Komesaroff. Gallaudet University Press, 2013. 154pp. $45.00 (hardcover). Discussions about power dynamics between the underprivileged and the privileged are crucial to making progress toward equity. Disabling Pedagogy: Power, Politics, and Deaf Education helps promote such dialogue by exploring Deaf and hearing people’s differing perspectives on the challenges to improving the quality of education for Deaf children. Linda R. Komesaroff, although not deaf herself, successfully captures the profound feelings many Deaf people have about the educational barriers they encounter growing up, in addition to their experiences of oppression in trying to enter the profession of deaf education. Her book includes information on power dynamics between dominant and marginalized groups, the history of Deaf education, studies related to the perspectives of Deaf and hearing people in education, and educational law relating to these topics. Although the author, a research fellow at Deakin University, in Melbourne, delves into the politics of Deaf education specifically in Australia, the experiences, perspectives, and barriers presented in the book are strikingly similar to what is happening in the United States. Komesaroff opens Disabling Pedagogy by placing Deaf identity on the same plane as identity based on gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. She describes how dominant groups hold beliefs based on their “knowledge and position in relation to ‘the other’” (p. x). After examining how power manifests itself in society through people and language, the author shares Deaf narratives that are often rendered invisible to the hearing community. By connecting important accounts in Deaf history, she guides hearing readers’ understanding and validates Deaf readers’ experiences of the oppression and struggles of Deaf people as informed by participants in her research. On the basis of the historical and current reality of Deaf education being run by nondeaf people, the author conducted a politically active research project to explore “the themes of power, politics, and the struggle for self-determination among Deaf people” (p. 11). To help readers better understand the dichotomy between Deaf and hearing views on deaf education, she categorizes these perspectives into two principal standpoints: “the Deaf worldview” and “the hearing worldview.” She presents the Deaf worldview as taking advantage of the richness of native signed language, Deaf culture, and Deaf role models in supporting students’ development in all academic areas, including English (spoken and written). In contrast, the hearing worldview is described as focusing on children’s deafness as the cause of their inability to speak, read, or write; therefore, more exposure to speech therapy is needed. The former places an emphasis on pedagogical causes for the difficulties Deaf students face in their educational quest, while the latter places the problem within the Deaf children’s bodies. Komesaroff describes her journey in supporting the transition of a school from being one with a hearing worldview to one based on the Deaf worldview. Her work with parents, teachers, and administrators provides a good model for people who are interested in helping Deaf schools adopt the bilingual approach. Strong leadership, teachers’ readiness for change, and parents’ support are identified as essential components of the transition. Educational leaders will find [End Page 398] strategies presented in this book beneficial to their effort to facilitate a smooth, healthy transition in their schools. In the subsequent chapters of the book, the author discusses laws on education that have shaped policies affecting Deaf education. Employing real-life scenarios, she provide an expanded picture of how laws can work either against or for the Deaf child’s access to quality education. Valuable information is shared about the reaches and limitations of parents’ power to hold the system accountable if their Deaf children are delayed in language and academic development. Therefore, this book is geared not only to teachers and administrators, but also to parents of Deaf children. As a Deaf educator and researcher heavily involved in Deaf education, I recommend Disabling Pedagogy: Power, Politics, and Deaf Education as a go-to book for anyone who wants to understand Deaf education through the contrasting lenses of Deaf people and hearing people. The author does a remarkable job of exploring...

Fluid Identities: A Journey of Terminology

Representations of Deafness and Deaf People in Young Adult Fiction

Deaf education in Croatia

Summary: Sign language is the primary daily language of many Deaf people, yet sign language is not always included as a part of Deaf Education. Teachers of the Deaf in France in the late 1700s and early 1800s established using sign language in the classroom and yet generations later educators chose to revert back to oralism, not including any sign language when teaching Deaf children. And the trend continues to this day. Researchers in the 1960s, 70s and 80s proved that sign languages are natural languages, and yet this fact did not change the difficulties schools still have in reassuring parents and administrators that the Deaf students will learn to communicate, read and write a sign language as with your fellow listeners regarding oral languages that speak. Now, in the 21st century most educators and researchers are aware that sign languages are sophisticated languages with grammar, syntax and large vocabularies. Yet accepting sign languages as written languages has taken longer. Those who support the idea of writing sign languages feel that the availability of written literature and poetry in sign languages will lead to improved literacy in oral languages and in the long run, increase acceptance by the hearing world. Showing that sign languages have a written form helps establish sign languages as foreign languages in schools. With the advent of the internet and social media, writing sign languages is spreading quickly. The year 2020 is the beginning of a new era of sign language literature.Keywords: Sign Language; Literature; SignWriting; Deaf; Education.

In 1834, a group of French deaf teachers organized a banquet in honor of the abbé Charles-Michel de l'Epée, the priest who had founded a school for deaf students in Paris over seventy years before. Fifty-four deaf men attended. Ferdinand Berthier offered a toast in French Sign Language to Epée, who had been a strong supporter of signing in deaf education, while Alphonse Lenoir toasted the “intellectual regeneration of the deaf .… scattered all over the globe” (p. 114). In this way, the banquet celebrated not just Epée and sign language, and not just a proud, collective French deaf identity, but also the commonality of deaf people worldwide. The organizers would host similar banquets annually for more than thirty years, attracting widespread attention; a cultural tradition had begun. This episode, like others that Anne T. Quartararo recounts, provides an illuminating glimpse of ways that deaf French people tried to advance their interests during this period. In recent decades, scholars such as Harlan Lane (When the Mind Hears [1984] and The Deaf Experience [2006]) and Lennard J. Davis (Enforcing Normalcy [1995]) have brilliantly examined how a vibrant community of deaf people who used sign language emerged in Paris in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Until now, however, we have lacked substantial scholarly attention to deaf people in France after 1830. With this book, Quartararo begins to fill that lacuna. Although her argument and organization could be improved, she reveals how, during the nineteenth century, pedagogical methods in French deaf education were highly contested, and how deaf people and their allies came up with ingenious strategies for advancing their language and well-being.

The traditions, the development, and the objectives of deaf education in Norway and Russia are different. One of the main differences is whether deaf education is in itself seen as intercultural communication, meaning to what degrees the sign language communities are treated as linguistic and cultural minorities or simply as disabled. Neither the Russian nor the Norwegian practice is internationally unique, but the two become recognizable in light of each other, and internationally, they represent two common ways of dealing with education for the deaf today. This article will discuss what are some of the differences and similarities in deaf education between Norway and Russia related to the status of the two countries’ signed languages and whether the deaf populations are viewed either as disabled or as a linguistic minority. The discussion is based on some historical occurrences leading to the current situations in the two countries. Two different discourses, a disability discourse and a minority discourse, will be presented. The disability discourse generally seems to be the most intuitive one among adult newcomers to this field, while the minority discourse more often needs a fair bit of elaboration. Therefore, more space will be devoted to the minority discourse in this article. Furthermore, the description of the differences and similarities in deaf education will draw on the writings of the Russian scholar Lev Vygotsky on (Russian) deaf education and look at what Joseph Stalin wrote about deaf people and language. I shall argue that Vygotsky’s suggestions seem to have had more impact in Norway than in Russia, while Stalin’s writings seemingly had a great impact on the view on Russian Sign Language (RSL1) and the practice and objectives of the Russian schools for the deaf. I will argue that a hundred years of experience of attempting to make the spoken majority language the first language of deaf children should lead to a change in direction.

Until the sixties linguists didn't show any interest in the natural language of prelingually deaf people. Generally speaking their communication system was not considered a real language comparable to any spoken language. The signs used by deaf people were taken as natural gestures. In 1880 at the Milan conference on deaf education it was decided that signs should no longer be used in the schools for the deaf and that deaf people should not be allowed to use their own communication system. Instead, the spoken language of the hearing environment should be learned. At that time deaf educators were convinced of the damaging influence on spoken language development of the use of signs. However, there is no evidence for this. On the contrary, research has shown that the use of sign language as a first language improves the communicative abilities of the deaf people, which could be the basis for learning the spoken language. Despite this resolution deaf communities continued, albeit isola-ted and not openly, to use their own communication system. In 1963 a book was published by an American linguist, William Stokoe, that changed the way in which people thought about sign language. He showed how signs can be analysed into elements comparable to phonemes in spoken language and started the lingu-istic research on grammatical aspects of American Sign Language. This research showed that sign language is indeed a 'real' language, equal to any spoken language and that deaf people should have the right to use this language. Following American research, many linguists in Europe discovered' sign languages in their countries. Even in traditionally oral countries like the Netherlands and Belgium. In this paper some grammatical aspects of sign languages are discussed.

<i>It’s a Small World: International Deaf Spaces and Encounters</i>. Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters, eds. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2015, 336 pp. $70.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-56368-653-5.

Switched at Birth: A Game Changer for All Audiences