Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kontra, Edit H.
• Laviosa, Sara
• González-Davies, Maria

Titel

Sign bilingual education of foreign languages

Ist Teil von

• The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education, 2020, p.353-366

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter discusses the most salient issues in sign bilingual education with special attention to implementing a bilingual-bimodal approach in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The field of deaf education is characterized by uniqueness and controversies. Contrary to popular belief, deaf bilingual education is not merely a copy of bilingual teaching methods used with hearing students since sign bilingual education is also bimodal: it entails the use of two languages in two different modalities: the sign language of the local Deaf community together with (usually the written version of) the spoken language of a hearing community. In order to help the reader appreciate the complexity of teaching and learning a foreign language in such contexts, this chapter first gives a brief overview of general issues in Deaf education, and this is followed by a detailed discussion of deaf bilingual education: its principles, methodological issues, the transfer of skills between languages, and questions to be answered by future research. The last part of the chapter looks into the application of a sign bilingual approach in teaching foreign languages, the problems encountered when a sign language interpreter is used, and the question of incorporating the foreign sign language in the teaching-learning process. This chapter looks at teaching foreign languages within the framework of deaf bilingual education. It provides an overview of the most fundamental issues in deaf education. The chapter explains the teaching of foreign languages to deaf persons with or without the involvement of sign language(s). It presents examples to the complexity of the issue of language use and choice of modality in the teaching of foreign languages to deaf persons. The chapter introduces some selected examples for using speech and sign language interpretation, and alsp presents cases when the teachers themselves use the local sign language as the medium of instruction. It explores the question of incorporating the foreign sign language in the teaching-learning process. The benefits of incorporating the foreign sign language in the teaching of a spoken/written foreign language are manifold and to our present knowledge the involvement of multiple languages as well as multiple modalities does not constitute any extra burden for the learners.