This article reports on an investigation of the effects of an experimental bilingual ASL/English syllabus on melalingulstic awareness for young deaf children. A special curriculum was created, centering on the Idling of stories first in ASL only, and later in both ASL and English. The purpose was to improve metalinguistic awareness as represented by an ability to distinguish between the two sign language varieties of ASL and signed English. The curriculum was piloted 2 to 5 hours a week for 14 months with a group of kindergarten children at a residential school for the deaf. Each subject was matched with a control child at another school where the experimental program was not taught. The children were given pre-and posttests for metalinguistic ability. Results indicated that the exposure to the syllabus increased mefolinguistic skills significantly for the experimental group, but that the control group experienced no such increase.
Deaf children in American schools are offered a variety of educational and language alternatives. They may be exposed to oral English, where emphasis is placed on speech discrimination, lip reading, use of aided residual hearing, and speech reading. Alternatively, their teachers may use some form of sign language in place of, or, more likely, in addition to spoken English. The signed input may take one of any number of forms ranging from an approximation to American Sign Language (ASL), if the teacher is deaf (most are hearing, see Woodward, This research was funded by NIDRR (formerly NItlR) grant #G008300146 to the University of California, San Francisco, Center on Deafness, and by a grant to the first author from the UCSF Academic Senate. The authors would like to thank ttenry Klopping, Jacob Arcanin, Marianne Deluca, and Pat Dorrance for making it possible to study at their school, and to Nancy Eldridge, Norma Richards, and Rosemary Marshall, the teachers who welcomed us into their classrooms with such good humor. Kathee Keller also went out of her way to give support and assistance at the control site. Suzy Bank-Schamberg provided much help on storytelling techniques. Most of all, the experimental program owes its success to Joyann Burdett, teacher extraordinaire, and tireless supporter of this approach. Thanks, too, to the children who both accepted and ignored us in just the right proportions, who willingly took part in extra tests, and who at times stayed on after school in order for the program to continue.