Bimodal Bilingual Programming at a Canadian School for the Deaf

Bimodal-bilingual or co-enrollment programs are emerging as one way to meet broader needs and provide expanded language, educational and social-emotional opportunities for students who are deaf and hard of hearing. However, there is limited research on students’ spoken language development, signed language growth, academic outcomes or the social and emotional factors associated with children attending these multimodal and plurilingual programs. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the first four years of implementing a bimodal-bilingual (American Sign Language and spoken English) program within an ASL milieu at a small Canadian school for the deaf. The considerations for language separation,