Documenting Syntactically and Semantically Incomplete Bimodal Input to Hearing-Impaired Subjects

Given that most hearing-impaired children in the United States are now exposed to some form of signed instructional input and that most teachers do not use ASL (Johnson, 1986), the syntactic and semantic nature of what is being signed to students merits investigation. Twelve female teachers served as subjects in this study, designed to document the characteristics of instructional bimodal communication in classrooms where SEE-2 and Signed English were used. Results were that some teachers could, indeed, accurately encode semantic information in their instruction and were extremely proficient in using a sign system. It is suggested that professionals and researchers concerned with the educational benefit of using pedagogical systems need to sample and analyze instructional input in authentic situations. Teacher trainers should consider the requirement of a reasonable (e.g., 80 percent or better) voice-to-sign ratio ability from future teachers enrolled in intermediate sign classes.