Current Trends

This workshop will focus on ASL/English for 0-5 year-old learners. We will also discuss the value in Primary Education/University collaborations, which can help provide evidence-based data on the efficacy of early language experience.

A specific and successful collaboration between a Reggio-Emilia ASL immersion classroom (The Rosen Family Preschool) and researchers at the University of California, Davis (Center for Mind and Brain) is presented. Together, we created ASL/English N-400 experiments to pair with our current assessment tools. Examples will be shown of videos of the ASL version (i.e. trials of the lead teacher signing picture trials, with some correct and incorrect target trials) and the English version (i.e. our hearing Speech Language Pathologist speaking the words with some correct and incorrect target trials), so we can discuss how such a tool can be used to help understand semantic development.

The audience will see classroom footage of our kids together, show code switching, and how those unfamiliar with Deaf culture, such as hearing speech pathologists, audiologists and special education teachers, miss the complex inner workings of a rich language environment that contains native ASL use for our young learners.

In 2018 a team of writers from across the education continuum developed the document “Optimizing Outcomes for Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing: Education Services Guidelines.”