Foreword

When Kristin Snoddon and Joanne C. Weber initially invited me to write a Foreword to Critical Perspectives on Plurilingualism in Deaf Education, I was reluctant to take on this responsibility because I am not an ‘insider’ in Deaf education. My engagement with the Deaf community in Ontario came about in the late 1980s when members of the Deaf Ontario Now movement approached me about the empirical research on bilingual education involving spoken/written languages and its potential relevance for bilingual-bicultural education involving natural sign languages (American Sign Language [ASL] or Langue des signes québécoise [LSQ]). As Snoddon (this volume) lucidly documents,