Supporting Deaf and Hard of Hearing Preschool Students' Emerging ASL Skills: A Bilingual Approach

Helping young deaf and hard of hearing children explore ASL and English is one of the important jobs with which the preschool teachers who work with those children are tasked. Learning ASL and English, the children will become bilingual, fluent in the two languages they will use throughout their lives. Working with two languages requires planning. Teachers need to work together to decide when and how to use each language. This enables teachers to avoid the use of simultaneous communication (i.e., signing and talking at the same time). Instead, teachers incorporate what is called "concurrent use of ASL and English," which means using specific strategies to incorporate both ASL and English into teaching (Baker, 2006; Gárate, 2012). There are two broad categories of ASL and English bilingual methodology: (1) concurrent use of both ASL and English, and (2) language separation (Gárate, 2011; 2012). Both categories are equally valuable. Therefore, teachers schedule times when they will use ASL only, times when they will use English only, and times when they will alternate between both languages. This article discusses how separating the use of ASL and English allows young learners to study the functions and purposes of each language and to strengthen their receptive and expressive skills.