Ensuring d/Deaf children become bilingual in sign language and English should be a key priority for policymakers and teachers because this plays an important role in their education, a new study says.
Curriculum and instruction in deaf education should provide opportunities for children to actively use sign language in schools.
British Sign Language (BSL) should be used as part of children’s spoken and written language development, particularly considering its significance for reading development. The study shows how skills transfer from sign language to support a wide range of spoken and written language abilities. The findings are published in the journal Review of Education.
There are many debates on how to best educate d/Deaf students for success in schools. Growing numbers of d/Deaf children are now educated in mainstream schools, where they will not get the same exposure to BSL.
The systematic review, of 70 studies, allowed researchers to identify close relationships between many “competencies” of sign language and spoken and written language.
