The impact of Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment on the language development of deaf and hearing children in Hong Kong: A whole school case study UCL-China Research Festival - Audio

Recent decades have seen the emergence of sign linguistics as a sub-discipline of linguistic research, accumulating a body of knowledge that has enlightened linguists about the complex grammatical properties of sign language. Researchers have also begun to show how sign language is acquired as a first language by deaf children who can then use this resource to develop spoken and written language for education and social communication in the hearing majority community. These findings have demonstrated that deaf children have the capacity to become bilingual in signed and spoken language, and that hearing children also benefit from early exposure to sign language. As a result of this change of linguistic orientation towards sign language researchers have begun to explore the concepts of Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment, involving deaf and hearing participants, teachers and learners in partnership with each other in an educational process that can promote children’ linguistic, cognitive and social development.

It is within this context that The Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies (CSLDS) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong launched a 7-year research programme in 2006 to explore an alternative model of deaf education that sets out to resolve the long-standing problem of low literacy skills and educational attainment among deaf children in HK. This research programme seeks to merge theoretical language acquisition models and applied linguistic research, with a particular focus on creating a model of deaf education that mediates between two languages and two cultures, providing bilingual linguistic resources which are accessible to both deaf and hearing children.

An important part of the research agenda is to investigate the impact of Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment on the language development of deaf and hearing children in pre-school and primary education. The research has been jointly designed by researchers from the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at UCL. It adopts a longitudinal approach to the evaluation process, profiling the grammatical development of signed and spoken language in the deaf and hearing children enrolled in this programme. At the end of the first year of implementation in 2006, children’s sign language development was documented using a picture story retelling task, spoken language vocabulary development was assessed by means of a word-picture matching task, and speech production and perception were evaluated using assessment batteries originally designed for Cantonese speech perception and production in hearing children. In this presentation, we will present results of some of our preliminary investigation and discuss some projected outcomes.