The videocassettes illustrate dialogues for the text it accompanies, and also provides ASL stories, poems and dramatic prose for classroom use. Each dialogue is presented three times to allow the student to "converse with" each signer. Also demonstrates the grammar and structure of sign language. The teacher's text on grammar and culture focuses on the use of three basic types of sentences, four verb inflections, locative relationships and pronouns, etc. by using sign language. The teacher's text on curriculum and methods gives guidelines on teaching American Sign Language and Structured activities for classroom use.
Sign Me Alice is an outrageous comedy and the most popular play ever shown at Gallaudet University. Based on Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, it teaches lessons about Deaf people and their conflicts with the hearing world over styles of communication.Laurent Clerc: A Profile is an historical play about the Deaf Frenchman who sacrificed his personal life to become America's first teacher of deaf children and who is the father of American Sign Language (ASL). Along with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, he made American deaf education possible in early 1800s.Combining Sign Me Alice & Laurent Clerc: Two Deaf Plays and Classroom Guide to Suggested Activities and Projects, teachers can bring a wonderful learning experience to deaf and hearing students in secondary schools, literature classes, and Deaf Studies classes. Unveiling many social issues within the Deaf community, the plays bring more awareness to the students about the importance of the rich visual language that is American Sign Language (ASL) and its history.
This unique collection of essays, accompanied by videos, at last brings a dazzling view of the literary, social, and performative aspects of American Sign Language to a wide audience. The book presents the work of a renowned and diverse group of deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing scholars who examine original ASL poetry, narrative, and drama. The videos showcases the poems and narratives under discussion in their original form, providing access to them for hearing non-signers for the first time. Together, the book and videos provide new insight into the history, culture, and creative achievements of the deaf community while expanding the scope of the visual and performing arts, literary criticism, and comparative literature. The videos may be viewed online at ucpress.edu/go/signingthebodypoetic.
"The moment when a society must contend with a powerful language other than its own is a decisive point in its evolution. This moment is occurring now in American society". Peters explains precisely how ASL literature achieved this moment, tracing its past and predicting its future in this trailblazing study. Peters connects ASL literature to the literary canon with the archetypal notion of carnival as "the counterculture of the dominated". Throughout history carnivals have been opportunities for the "low", disenfranchised elements of society to displace their "high" counterparts. Citing the Deaf community's long tradition of "literary nights" and festivals like the Deaf Way, Peters recognizes similar forces at work in the propagation of ASL literature. The agents of this movement, Deaf artists and ASL performers -- "Tricksters", as Peters calls them -- jump between the two cultures and languages. Through this process they create a synthesis of English literary content reinterpreted in sign language, which also raises the profile of ASL as a distinct art form in itself. Peters applies her analysis to the craft's landmark works, including Douglas Bullard's novel Islay and Ben Bahan's video-recorded narrative Bird of a Different Feather. Deaf American Literature, the only work of its kind, is its own seminal moment in the emerging discipline of ASL literary criticism.
The burgeoning of research on signed language during the last two decades has had a major influence on several disciplines concerned with mind and language, including linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, child language acquisition, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and deaf education. The genealogy of this research can be traced to a remarkable degree to a single pair of scholars, Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, who have conducted their research on signed language and educated scores of scholars in the field since the early 1970s. The Signs of Language Revisited has three major objectives: * presenting the latest findings and theories of leading scientists in numerous specialties from language acquisition in children to literacy and deaf people; * taking stock of the distance scholarship has come in a given field, where we are now, and where we should be headed; and * acknowledging and articulating the intellectual debt of the authors to Bellugi and Klima--in some cases through personal reminiscences. Thus, this book is also a document in the sociology and history of science.
Written by authors who are themselves Deaf, this unique book illuminates the life and culture of Deaf people from the inside, through their everyday talk, their shared myths, their art and performances, and the lessons they teach one another. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries employ the capitalized "Deaf" to refer to deaf people who share a natural language—American Sign Language (ASL—and a complex culture, historically created and actively transmitted across generations. Signed languages have traditionally been considered to be simply sets of gestures rather than natural languages. This mistaken belief, fostered by hearing people’s cultural views, has had tragic consequences for the education of deaf children; generations of children have attended schools in which they were forbidden to use a signed language. For Deaf people, as Padden and Humphries make clear, their signed language is life-giving, and is at the center of a rich cultural heritage. The tension between Deaf people’s views of themselves and the way the hearing world views them finds its way into their stories, which include tales about their origins and the characteristics they consider necessary for their existence and survival. Deaf in America includes folktales, accounts of old home movies, jokes, reminiscences, and translations of signed poems and modern signed performances. The authors introduce new material that has never before been published and also offer translations that capture as closely as possible the richness of the original material in ASL. Deaf in America will be of great interest to those interested in culture and language as well as to Deaf people and those who work with deaf children and Deaf people.
An Introduction to Language Policy: Theories and Method is a collection of newly-written chapters that cover the major theories and methods currently employed by scholars active in the field. provides an accessible introduction to the study of language policy research and language’s role in social life consists of newly commissioned essays written by internationally recognized scholars helps define and describe a growing field of inquiry and is an authoritative source for students, scholars and researchers in linguistics, applied linguistics, education, policy studies and related areas includes section overviews, annotated chapter bibliographies, and discussion questions
Bragg (English, Gallaudet U.) has collected a selection of sources including political writings and personal memoirs covering topics such as eugenics, speech and lip-reading, the right to work, and the controversy over separation or integration. This book offers a glimpse into an often overlooked but significant minority in American culture, and one which many of the articles asserts is more like an internal colony than simply a minority group. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
