Hearing loss support - LAT: Wary of Taking Spanish or French? Raise Your Hands

Author

LAT: Wary of Taking Spanish or French? Raise Your Hands

Kuacou

2005-01-18, 7:12 pm

Wary of Taking Spanish or French? Raise Your Hands
Sign language fulfills the requirement at many college campuses, but some
question its merit.

By Stuart Silverstein
Times Staff Writer

Los Angeles Times
January 18, 2005

Photo 1:
http://tinyurl.com/4c7x2
Caption:
"Making it fun is my goal," says Lisa Chahayed, who teaches American Sign
Language at two community colleges.
(Béatrice de Géa / LAT)

Photo 2:
http://tinyurl.com/4m7wo
Caption:
John Vizzard chats in ASL with Pierce college classmate Aubrey Canfield.
(Béatrice de Géa / LAT)

Enrollments have soared in American Sign Language classes at colleges around
the country, but many of the students aren't planning to become sign
language interpreters or teachers for the deaf.

Instead, they are looking for a way to avoid taking Spanish, French or
another spoken language.

"I thought, 'Cool, you can talk with your hands,' " said Marisol Arzate, a
student at Pierce college in Woodland Hills.

Arzate, 20, who earns A's and Bs in community college, had struggled in her
high school Spanish classes despite learning the basics from her
Mexican-born parents. When she registered at Pierce for her first semester
of American Sign Language, Arzate said her hunch was, "This should be easy.
No big deal."

These days Arzate warns that ASL actually is tough to master, and so do many
others with normal hearing who have studied the language. Still, it is
attracting lots of students who prefer to learn visually and who attend, or
plan to enroll at, schools that approve ASL for meeting language
requirements.

So many students have discovered ASL in recent years that it recorded the
fastest enrollment growth rate of any "foreign language" offered on U.S.
college campuses, according to the Modern Language Assn. The association
says ASL has become the fifth most widely studied foreign language in
college, trailing only Spanish, French, German and Italian.

Yet academic leaders remain divided on the educational merits. Although the
list of colleges approving ASL for foreign-language entrance or graduation
requirements keeps growing, some prominent schools, including such
California campuses as USC and Pomona College, are holdouts. They contend
that ASL ‹ unlike, say, French ‹ doesn't open a window into another
country's culture.

That debate hasn't dampened students' enthusiasm. Among those pushing up
enrollment are ambitious high school students who flock to community
colleges for ASL classes because they aren't offered at their high schools.
Many want a different way to earn language credits for their college
applications.

"Spoken language really is not my big strong suit," said Sterling Hirsh, a
15-year-old sophomore at North Hollywood High School's highly gifted magnet
program who studies ASL at Glendale Community College.

Hirsh, whose rigorous high school schedule includes three Advanced Placement
courses and who is most interested in computers, math and physics, added, "I
knew it would be a lot of fun to learn, because it's a lot more involved
than just reading from a book, learning vocabulary and stuff like thatŠ.
It's more physical."

He credits his success in ASL partly to his teacher, Lisa Chahayed, an
instructor at Glendale and Pierce. Chahayed, 41, who has been deaf since
birth, runs a fast-paced class, with animated give-and-take, communicated
through gestures and signs.

The quiet of the classroom ‹ there is no speaking ‹ is shattered every few
minutes by the laughter she draws from her students with lighthearted
role-playing.

"Making it fun is my goal," Chahayed said in an e-mail. "I can tell who
understands me by seeing which students laugh and which don't."

Many of her students had no ties to the deaf community before studying ASL
and have no specific plans to use the language professionally. Still,
Chahayed is optimistic that these students will leave class with "a brand
new outlook on life and that they appreciate us for who we are and how much
we go through."

The origins of American Sign Language are traced at least to the late 1600s,
when a type of sign language was used by the deaf community on Martha's
Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast. The language moved closer to its
current form in the early 1800s when a Protestant minister ‹ Thomas Hopkins
Gallaudet, for whom Gallaudet university in Washington, D.C., is named ‹
helped establish a Connecticut school for the deaf.

Today, it generally is estimated that up to 500,000 people use ASL as their
primary language.

Academics have widely recognized ASL as a full-fledged language with a
complex grammar. It relies on arm and hand movements as well as body posture
and facial expressions. Although deaf people sometimes sprinkle English into
their sign language conversations by finger-spelling words, ASL has its own
distinct vocabulary. One dictionary, compiled by educator Martin Sternberg,
lists more than 7,000 entries.

ASL "is not English on the hands," said Carol Neidle, a linguist at Boston
University.

What's more, ASL is far different from, say, Mexican, Japanese or even
British Sign Language. Deaf people from different countries often struggle
to communicate, much the way speakers of other languages do.

Linguists overwhelmingly dismiss the notion that ASL is easy to learn, even
though it lacks a written literature and comes more quickly to some students
than spoken languages.

Robert J. Blake, director of the UC Consortium for Language Learning and
Teaching, said ASL students enjoyed the same benefits as those learning
foreign languages: "You learn to be able to think in new ways and refer to
things in new ways."

Largely for those reasons and because of advocacy by deaf activists, leading
universities ‹ including Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley and UCLA ‹ have decided
since the early 1990s to allow ASL to fulfill foreign-language requirements.

Sherman Wilcox, chairman of university of New Mexico's linguistics
department, estimates that more than 150 U.S. campuses have accepted ASL as
a foreign language.

Yet some of the nation's top schools, including Harvard and Princeton, have
resisted. USC's main undergraduate college rejected ASL as a foreign
language when the school last reviewed the issue about five years ago.

Boston University, which rejected ASL as a foreign language in 1994, is at
the center of the debate. Its college of Arts and Sciences is reviewing the
matter.

Jeffrey Henderson, Boston University's dean of arts and sciences, said his
college's current requirement "doesn't aim only for students to achieve a
certain competence in a language but also [to learn] a language that
provides access to the culture of another society. That's what's under
debate, because ASL is a North American language."

The Modern Language Assn.'s figures for 2002, the most recent year it has
tracked, show that enrollment in college ASL classes reached 60,781, with
nearly 30% of those students in California.

The association said the number of ASL students was up 432% from four years
earlier but acknowledged that the increase probably was inflated somewhat by
survey techniques. Still, no other language came close to that kind of
growth. Arabic, the second-biggest gainer, posted a 92.5% rise. Some deaf
studies experts say ASL programs are being added so quickly that qualified
teachers are in short supply.

In California, a separate analysis found that 28,504 students took ASL
classes in the state's community colleges last year. That was up 25% from
five years before and more than double the level of a decade earlier.

Elenna Turner, college counselor at El Camino Real High School in Woodland
Hills, said that she has steered students to community college courses in
ASL to satisfy second-language entrance requirements at UC and Cal State
campuses.

"I used to feel sorry for kids who struggled with Spanish" or other spoken
languages, she said. "That's not their only option anymore."

Yet by no means is all of the enrollment surge the result of students
looking for an alternative. There is demand for ASL teachers and
interpreters, and the language is useful in counseling and customer service
fields.

Many students became intrigued by watching sign language interpreters at
church services. Some want to communicate better with deaf relatives or
friends. Others are fascinated by the language's physical expressiveness.

Sign language gained widespread attention in popular culture in the 1980s
with the theater and film versions of "Children of a Lesser God," a love
story between a speech teacher and a deaf woman. Passage of the Americans
With Disabilities Act in 1990 further encouraged use of the language.

One of the campuses that pioneered the teaching of ASL was Cal State
Northridge, which has one of the nation's few deaf studies programs and is
home to the National Center on Deafness.

Northridge is where Kristin Carr, 21, a Glendale Community college student
studying ASL, eventually hopes to transfer to earn a bachelor's degree in
deaf studies. Carr, who has full hearing, started taking sign language in
high school, partly out of a longtime interest but also because "I tried
Spanish, and it didn't work out too well."

She was captivated by the idea of helping deaf people and becoming an
interpreter. In her part-time job at Starbucks, she uses her skills to take
orders from deaf customers.

That, in turn, has kindled enthusiasm for ASL among her co-workers. "They
say, 'Teach me, teach me!'" Carr said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/l....story?coll=la-
home-local

PATRICIA BURNS

2005-01-19, 2:10 am

Kuacou wrote:

> Wary of Taking Spanish or French? Raise Your Hands
> Sign language fulfills the requirement at many college campuses, but some
> question its merit.
>
> By Stuart Silverstein
> Times Staff Writer
> ------%<-------------------
> http://www.latimes.com/news
> local/la-me-sign18jan18,0,3300888.story?coll=la-home-local

Thanks for posting this.

--
Patricia Burns
(to reply via email...address has only one "s")

LMM123

2005-02-03, 11:01 am

American Sign Language (ASL) is the 3rd most used language in the United
States!!! It is used by a people of a rich culture "Deaf Culture". As
for college credit; wonderful!! I think that ASL is more useful than
Spanish, French, German, etc. Just because a person takes Spanish, French
or some other spoken language doesn't mean that person will become an
interpreter for those languages, simply means they will gain insight to
the languages and possibly some culture. I think it is awesome that ASL
is becoming so popular, the more the merrier!!! :D

ardway

2005-02-03, 11:01 am

LMM123 wrote:

> American Sign Language (ASL) is the 3rd most used language in the United
> States!!! It is used by a people of a rich culture "Deaf Culture". As
> for college credit; wonderful!! I think that ASL is more useful than
> Spanish, French, German, etc. Just because a person takes Spanish, French
> or some other spoken language doesn't mean that person will become an
> interpreter for those languages, simply means they will gain insight to
> the languages and possibly some culture. I think it is awesome that ASL
> is becoming so popular, the more the merrier!!! :D
>

Ridiculous! ASL is a wonderful thing for the deaf to be able to
communicate, but far more deaf and hard of hearing use speech reading
than sign. There is this ethos of perceived superiority among signing
adults that keeps mainstream deaf and severely HOH people like me from
even considering it as an alternative.
Learning French, German, Russian or Italian opens the door to the
richness of the writings of their intellectuals, philosophers,
novelists, artists, etc. Learning sign enables you to ask another deaf
person where the bathroom is. Name one philosophical or work of
literature written by someone who's primary language is ASL. Helen
Keller, a deaf intellectual, couldn't sign, e.g.

ardway

Bill M

2005-02-03, 11:01 am

ardway wrote:
"There is this ethos of perceived superiority among signing
adults that keeps mainstream deaf and severely HOH people like me from
even considering it as an alternative."

It's not an alternative, it's an auxilary, at least for people like ardway.
Worth learning. Signing can be a big help at home. Signing helps for
adding more people to your life. It can be a big help if searching for a
spouse.

There are lots of signing adults making a respectable effort to be more like
ardway. Some of them get there, but in signing company it doesn't show.
Everybody wants to be both ways.

The percieved superiority ardway speaks of does not exist. What does exist
is respect ( and envy ) for people who have been able to leave parent's
home, respect for deaf people who have been able to move themselves beyond a
life of school, church, home of parents. Well, it's natural to try to
maintian pride, and people like ardway get pushed away often.

About culture, it's difficult to know what is real and what is promoted.
The promotion can get really stupid at times.

Bill M