Word: asl
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...ASL students applied to Harvard regular decision this year, compared to 10 who applied to Brown...
...American School of London (ASL), 80 to 85 percent of the graduating class of about 110 students attends college in the U.S., said Thelma Bullock, director of college counseling at the school...
...story of the deaf in America is intimately bound up with ASL and its travails. Traditionally, schooling for the deaf featured attempts, usually unsuccessful, to get them to learn and speak languages they couldn't hear. In the early 1800s, however, American instructors, acknowledging deaf practice, began teaching a language composed entirely of gestures. ASL became the backbone of almost all formal schooling for the deaf. In 1880, however, educators reverted to a philosophy called oralism. Unlike ASL, oralism was committed to English: written, lip-read and spoken...
...Oralism was only sporadically successful, and schools that subscribed to it or to related techniques found that students still learned ASL on the sly. "Try as they might, they were unable to stamp out sign language," says Northeastern University linguist Harlan Lane, author of The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community. Yet "signing" would wait another century for its renaissance: in the 1960s, when linguists certified it as just as autonomous, flexible and rich as English, it became the core of an identity movement that still flourishes today. More than half a million ASL speakers -- a group sometimes plagued...
Only a minority of institutions practice pure oralism anymore; but a babel of challenges to ASL remain. Mainstreaming, the widespread and generally salutary policy of removing students with disabilities from special schools and seeding them through regular classes, may be counterproductive for the deaf. They cannot be expected simply to "pick up" English from their new classmates; and yet removing them from an all-deaf environment may prevent them from picking up ASL. Northeastern's Lane talks grimly of their "drowning in the mainstream." Total communication, which asked teachers to sign ASL and speak English simultaneously, although once popular, seems...