 Hello. The title of this piece is Fire Alarm. Curious. Next. It's noon, and I sit at a long table full of other children. Tables and tables. Long tables in a huge room. The older kids go and sit in their areas, and us younger ones have our particular place. We sit on the benches with our legs swinging. The bright windows shine the light into the room. A big heavy cafeteria lady comes up and puts a tray right in front of us. One each, she admonishes us. So we grab our hard, lack food and start cutting into it and talk amongst each other. Everybody's having a wonderful time as they consume their lunch. And then we take our trays and put them in the slot and go back and sit to wait until it's time to leave. One by one, everybody takes their trays and we have to wait. And of course, we're being monitored by a stern-faced proctor. We all talk and have a great time, and then it's time for recess. Wonderful. Everybody gets off the bench. And it's appropriate that we put our chairs back exactly where they were and file out of the building. All of us go down the stairway and I see a little red box on the wall with a sign that says, Do Not Touch. And I say to my friend, look at that. We could pull it. No, no, no, my friend says there's no way on earth I'm going to pull that thing. Do not touch. Do not touch. Well, I could just touch it. I could just touch it. But when I touched it, out came the glass and all these alarms started blaring and these lights started flashing and we ran as fast as we could. Ran and ran and ran out to the playground. I ran as fast as I could to anywhere that I thought I could blend in. There's a crowd of kids playing over there. There's some other kids on a tube swing. They sit into a swing and I start just swinging. Hoping nobody notices me. All the children are playing. They're throwing balls and they're playing basketball. I'm just swinging. Hoping nobody notices and I look towards the building where the lights are flashing and people are coming out of the building. I just keep swinging. And the mustache, large, nose, big gutted principal comes out and asks somebody, who did it? They pointed to me and his eyes followed the pointing and his gaze fixed on me. You come here. I stopped swinging and I jumped off into the sand and walked slowly towards him. Up, up past his girth, I looked up into his eyes and he said, follow me with his little mustache and his flaring nose. All of the lights were still flashing and I followed the principal slowly. Kids who were talking and playing stopped to watch the sad progression as I followed him back to the building. All the lights were still flashing and the alarm was still going. Come here, he said. And we ascended the long staircase. I still saw those lights flashing. That alarm was still going. Up, up, up the staircase we went till we came into his office. Sit down, he said. And so I sat in the large chair. My feet didn't even touch the ground. I was so little. And he sat behind his big desk and regarded me sternly. Time to phone your parents, he said. No, no, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I said. He opens up a bottom drawer and takes out a patty whack. Should I give you a patty whack? He said, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I said. He puts back the patty whack. I said, I'm really, really sorry. And then he comes around and he says, stand up. So I stood up. Turn around. So I turned around. And he puts my head down, bends me over and spanks me. And I screamed. And he spanked me again. And I screamed even louder. And he spanked me again. And I screamed. And I cried. Oh, it hurt so badly. And then he stands me up and he sits me down again. I cried. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. The door opens. And I look from bottom to top at the figure of a fireman with his big boots and his yellow coat and his big hat. I'm sorry, I said to him. He starts to talk to me. He's speaking to me. I didn't understand what he was saying. I just kept sobbing. I had fallen to the floor and he stood me up and the mustache principal looked at me. I'm so sorry. Go on, leave, he said. The fireman padded me on my head understandingly. And I went out the door. Finally, the alarm had stopped. I saw people talking. I stepped out and saw many fire trucks, firemen looking around disgustingly. Why were we called? What was the point of this? I went down the steps. All conversations stopped. Everybody watched me come down shame-facedly. I'd been crying so much I had spattered my clothes with my tears. I came down the steps and I looked around and I said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And the principal said, do you get it now? Do you get it? I said, yes, I do. And then he gave me a big hug. Let's go on with our topic now. I think you've seen what it is in your program. It's achieving literacy with deaf children. And it's not the achievement of literacy, it's achieving the process of deaf children's literacy. I've worked with Kathy and Tina. And there's also a fourth person who's in our group that's Jenny Singleton. And actually my university is an Arizona State University. It's the University of Arizona. Anyway, this is the first time that I'll be sharing my research that I've done under the Department of Education grant on working with deaf children's literacy. We want to see if ASL literacy will help with their interactions with other people, their social skills and their educational skills. I just planned for a three-year project. And part of the project I want to share with you comes from work that Sarah Shelley did working with hearing children, deaf children. She looked at their ASL proficiency and their proficiency in English writing. They wanted to see if there was a relationship between the two and if it would lead to better writing proficiency. The studies with other hearing children are quite interesting. I'd like to look at them in relation to how deaf children could learn. Part of it is their oral tradition. We want to know if hearing children's speaking abilities, storytelling abilities are related in some way to their writing ability. If improving their storytelling ability will improve the writing ability. So we want to look at both the writing and speech. Of course, they did this study with children who are hearing and who already have great English competency. And they found that retelling was the method of teaching children how to tell stories helped them with elaborating the stories that they told and increased their skills in storytelling. The measure they used to determine this was called the T-Unit. It seemed to be a very good way of measuring how elaborated their stories were. If they were quite elaborated, if they were quite embellished and included a lot of information and techniques from English, or were more simple and plain. So I thought about using that with deaf children. We thought we could look at the same issues in the deaf community with deaf children. I thought maybe storytelling could help improve their English skills. But before we looked at their English skills, we really needed to look at the ASL skills of deaf children. And as a group, they haven't really acquired ASL yet. It's not the same situation as it is with hearing children who have already acquired English. There's also different levels of the language that we want to look at, the linguistic level, which is more of the structures of individual sentences, and the larger discourse level, which is more about the structure of the story. I looked at different groups of deaf children. Deaf children who had deaf parents, deaf children who have hearing parents, but have no sign language at home. Their parents don't know sign language, and there's no sign in their environment. And we know that that's 90% of all the deaf children. But we still haven't established any kind of sign language services for medial sign language services for that group of children who don't have ASL yet. They don't use discourse in their everyday life. They don't use ASL in any kind of extended discourse. Discourse enables children to learn language, so we would think that if we worked on their ASL discourse, it also would improve their linguistic skills. So we had three sets of questions. One question about the feasibility of hearing deaf children of hearing parents learning ASL. The second part of our study looked at how we could provide these services that would increase their ability in ASL. And the third was effectiveness. What was the results? Did it work out to help the deaf children learn ASL better? So that was our project and our plan. But then we had to find a site that we could use to study children. And it seemed that the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind was near enough to us that it was feasible to work there. So we planned on a three-year project. Unfortunately, after the second year, the project was dropped, so we didn't get to finish the study. But we did get data from the second year that we were able to analyze and tell you the results of today. At that time, the school hadn't had any kind of program or plan for working with children in this way, and so we had to start the program ourselves. And we started a program called ASL ESL, which was American Sign Language in English as a second language program. And with those support services, we hoped that we would increase children's ability to use ASL. We focused on children in elementary school in two groups. The kids in the first class were in fourth, second, third grade, and those children in the second class were fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. They were ranging from ages of 6 to 11. And there were multicultural and Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics, African Americans. Out of the 22 children we were able to use, we studied 15 of them because the other children had other types of disabilities as well. We divided the nine children into three groups. Today I'm only going to talk about nine of them. And there will be three children in each of the three groups. The three groups are deaf children of deaf parents, deaf children of hearing parents who sign, and deaf children of hearing parents who don't sign. So we're going to be comparing each of those groups and also each individual child within the group. Now, I think we're ready for the overhead, Kathy. Actually, we had to think about how to study deaf children and their signing abilities. And we decided that we would look at different interactions they had. So first we wanted to see how they interacted with children who were like them. So we took children who had the same background if they were deaf parents. We had child who had deaf parents and we videotaped their interaction. Second elicitation was what we called retelling. And in this situation, we had the child watch a movie from the ASL test battery that is the story of the rabbit and the turtle race. And we asked the children to watch that and videotaped their retelling of the story. And then the third one, the third session, we interviewed them. An adult would interview them and we used that. So all three of these interactions were videotaped and we analyzed those videotapes for their storytelling and sign language ability. And, oh, now we're going to tell you what the data was that we looked for. This just shows a portion of what we looked at. The next overhead shows the rest of it. You might wonder why we chose these structures to look at. Actually, we looked at the literature of the linguistics of ASL that has been done and we found eight different groups, features, eight different groups of structures we wanted to look at and then features under each of the groups. So you can see under sign utterance there are three different features we looked at. Single sign prediction, production of ten signs, two sign predictions. So you can see that each group was divided up like that. The order that we arranged this was in the order that deaf children learn the structures of sign language starting with single sentences all the way to more complex constructions like classifiers and so on, which would appear later on in their acquisition. Now the three groups at the end that you see on the overhead are those, the ones that I talked about before, deaf children of deaf parents. The second group is deaf children who sign. The third, deaf children hearing parents who don't sign. Then we looked at the child's videotape to see if a certain feature appeared in the videotape at any point and then we recorded that they had learned that feature. There were mistakes and we recorded the errors in another place but I'm not going to be talking about that today. Now these are the seventh and eighth categories that we looked at. You can see also that there's another column here for spring. The children were involved with this program both the first and second year and we wanted to test at the beginning of the second year and fall what they knew and then retest them again in spring. The pre-test and the post-test that we have so we can compare their abilities at the two points in time. Really the numbers are very rough that we have here. There are eight structures that appear so we want to know if all eight show up and we also want to know if all of the individual features also show up and there are 24 features that they could learn. 24 categories and features together. It seemed like the deaf children who learned sign language at home from their parents and well from their parents it didn't matter if they were hearing or deaf the parents were hearing or deaf all came out with the same results in the beginning at the pre-test but not the children who didn't have hearing parents whose hearing parents didn't sign. However at the post-test they were all equal again so it seems they reached the maximum proficiency that the test studied just on the number of structures they had. So it seems like maybe they have acquired the language and they've all acquired it at the same level perhaps. We have to look at that. So what is the problem with this? So this seems to say that deaf children after this program are all fine there all at the same level of ability and the ESL curriculum is ready to start now. They've already learned ESL and now they're ready to start on English but actually that's not what happened. There's a difference between linguistic structure acquiring linguistic structure and acquiring discourse. Now we have to look at what they acquired and what discourse level they acquired and actually I found that they still had not achieved proficiency in that we thought that the deaf children who had deaf parents were completely competent but they weren't yet. When we look at discourse we'll be able to see that. Anyway this seems to be a good result so far. You might want to know exactly what the project was that we had and what helped the children learn this kind of language and Tina's going to talk to us about that now. The acquisition of ESL and that lab. It has four walls in it. Let me tell you what it physically looks like. It has four walls and the activities that are included in that lab what might they look like? Well we play games. The purpose of the games is to expand their language usage. For example they might learn the rules of turn taking or the importance of eye contact or they'll learn how to take turns. Those are important aspects of the games. A second activity might be a Disney movie for example like The Lion King or Cinderella. Those movies are good for children to sit and watch and to receive language stimulation from. As the ASL specialist I do like a sign over for the cartoon and I explain to the children what's been going on on the videotape in the Disney movie. And the third activity that happens in the lab is the third activity in the lab are signed stories. For example some of the stories are original stories in ASL that have been created in ASL and told in ASL. And then another group are stories that are translated from English into ASL. So those are the two types of stories of the videotapes that we've collected and have in the lab. The videotapes, you might want to know what they look like. So these are, there's a videotape that's called 4 for you. If you can see 4 for you videotape has four volumes in it. The videotapes in 4 for you are divided into two categories. Fables, storytelling role-playing and fairy tales storytelling. The one on the left, fables, has two parts. Some are storytelling and the others involve role-playing. There are two, each story has two different components to it. And then underneath you can see the list, the names of the stories that are included. They tend to be very short stories. They are very good for children who have limited attention span or limited ASL proficiency. They tend to be the children from the hearing parents with no signs. The column on the right, there are only stories, the fairy tales, there are only stories. You can see the names of the stories listed here. These tend to be about 15 minutes in length. They're good for children who have already acquired language and are ready for more in-depth analysis of ASL. And that's what storytelling is. We are emphasizing the concept of retelling for the importance of language expansion. We use the retelling process in ASL acquisition and also discourse development. And this is the process. This entire process is good for normal deaf children, like the deaf children of deaf parents who have already acquired going through the process. This is how normal children would go through the process. Now, if we look in the lab, what might that process look like in the lab when we focus it on a specific group of students? See the black heading at the top of the overhead? The videotape viewing. I might pick one story. It's the same story we use throughout the entire process. We don't use different stories. We only pick one videotape and use it throughout the whole process. I'll pick a story and the children will watch the videotape. They'll watch through beginning to the end. And then when we're done, we do an analysis of the context and the production of the signs that we used on the videotape. For example, what do we mean by a particular sentence? And what I might say, for example, in the bear and the bee, the bee comes and stings the bear on the nose and the bear's nose, they use a sign such as this pulsating on the nose and I ask the kids, what does that mean? And they have to tell me all the bear hurt his nose. So we analyze the very specific signs that are used and we go through the videotape and we pause it and we discuss the videotape and we do a little bit more and then we stop it and discuss the content again. And then we go back and repeat. We do a repeated viewing and now we're into the pink box. So the first activity is that we repeat the viewing. We look at it all over again from beginning to end. And then we're ready to do role-playing. The children assume the different characters in the story and act out the story. But, however, there is a problem. What happens if the kids don't know how to role-play? So I, as an ASL language model, as an ASL specialist, I jump in and model for them role-playing. So I act out the stories. So there is this added step in there for when students don't know how to do role-playing. I have a videotape that has various clips in it and if something breaks down in the storytelling, I'll jump in and help them out and as long as it's going okay, they're fine. So let me show you a videotape of this portion of the process. There's a question from the audience here. That's the lab that, and those were deaf children. Okay, now you can see on my procedure here, there's a little arrow. If we need to repeat the videotaping, the children will watch the videotaping again or we can go back and have the children do the role-playing again. That's what you were just seeing them do. They repeated role-playing and now they're ready to go to step two or procedure two. It's the same story we're using and the children are each videotaped telling the story. Then we evaluate the retelling of the story as a group. The children all sit around and I'm there to facilitate and discuss and I might say, oh, you missed some information or you missed an important part maybe the sequences were out of order and so we'll sit around and we'll discuss those. It's not a critique really but it's a way to help the students facilitate their learning and expand their language. Then we look at the movie again. Then we do the retelling again and we go back and do the retelling. I'm involved in this as well and I'm videotaped just like the students are and then we repeat the retelling. We don't need the videotaping. We would individually, we might take turns and again we might have problems again. So then I'll stick my videotape in for example. So again, I might be talking with the children and maybe something isn't particularly clear in the discussion so then we look at my videotape, my model of the retelling of the story and then we talk about that. So either we may watch the videotape again or we may go back and watch the original story again and then we do the retelling part. Then individual students tell their stories, each take turns telling their stories and then if it's all a success then we get to go all the way back to the top again, back up to the black box and we're ready for a new story. The old one's all done and then we go all through the both procedures all over again. For students who have limited ASL they really start to acquire a great deal of language development and then they're ready to go back to the classroom and join with their own class. Ready to join with the children of deaf parents. So when they join their classes we remove the language model now, okay? That classroom, in the classroom the teacher is responsible for the third procedure. It's the same process all over again. Procedure one, procedure two and now we've added procedure three. The story structure analysis. It's a more detailed analysis of what's going on. More sequence, more discussion of the sequence, more discussion of the analysis, more discussion of the characters that are involved, how they respond, how they act, what's included, what are the outcomes so that there's much more analysis of what's going on in the story and a much more detailed discussion among the children. Then we do a retelling again. In individual students we videotape all of the students retelling the story one more time. Then there's an evaluation based on the story structure. How detailed was it? And then we look at the videotape. Maybe you didn't show the feeling correctly or the character's response wasn't done correctly. So then the students go back four and then once again there's a retelling of the individual students telling the story. And if it's successful, if the loop is successful then we get to go all the way back to the beginning again and select another story and go through procedure one, two, three all over again without the language model. Now, in the lab when we look at procedures one and two are they successful for children? Kathy Frationaut now will talk about the results of her study to find out if in fact procedure one and two are successful for students. Okay. Sam just talked about the results of his project looking at the the rabbit and turtle story. I'm going to also look at the story but I also want to discuss some more in depth. I'm going to look at the individual children that the children has groups and then I'm going to look at and you notice that he talked about the fact that we had three different elicitation situations and I'm only going to be looking at the second one and do a close study of an analysis of their storytelling and that the second one was the rabbit turtle story elicitation. So I'm going to look at the I looked at all of the stories we had the children look at the entire story and then ask them to retell it. I then transcribed their story in glosses following the system that Vista curriculum uses. The transcription was an exact record of what the child signed and when I did my and I used it to do my analysis. When I did my analysis I I measured it in T units which studies the elaboration of the sentence and the complexity of the structures that the children use. This measures different structures that ASL uses and I try to use T units in the same way that people have studied spoken language in English half but I needed to change it in some way to fit ASL structure in English. People study entire sentences and consider that the T unit in English. They'll look at a clause they'll look at the noun phrase and the verb phrase of the sentence and not the entire sentence but just at the phrase levels noun phrase and verb phrase levels. So we looked at classifiers for us in signs so that was in the first group. So we have this one X is because we want to be able to give a weighted system so that more complex structures in ASL would be given more weight and children who had those structures would get more credits for having that as opposed to having the more simplistic structures. So we have this categorized by complexity of the structure. Frozen signs you might want to know the difference between classifiers and frozen signs. This would be a classifier for a run and this is the frozen sign to run. This classifier would be separately coded. The children would be coded how their classifiers and frozen signs separately coded. So we're talking about the movement of the shoulders and the body and the eyes to represent different characters. Verb agreement would be the movement of a sign to show known subject-object relationships. Verbs of motion and then noun verb pairs should be the difference between signs like sit and chair that differ in movement aspect and number. Talk about inflections on verbs and non-manual markers would be like eyebrow raising and so on that mark clauses in ASL. So then we have an analysis of how many features the child uses and how many two units. In two units, when studying English and students' abilities in English people look at sentences but we're not really sure exactly what the sentence structure is of ASL. I mean the individual sentences are of ASL so instead we've used a different criteria for deciding what a T-unit is in ASL. So we have two basic criteria criteria. One based on the noun phrase and one based on the verb pairs. That includes noun static and rule shifting. Then in segmentation verb phrases they're based on verbs on the conjunctions then and but and finish. So I use those criteria to separate T-units in an utterance. There are actually several more. I could show how I used each of these features to determine T-units but instead I'm just going to show how I used the nouns to determine the units. Now I'm going to show you what one of the this is an example of what one of the children signed. So then I see the sign rabbit which is a noun then I segment the T-unit there then I see the sign here that's also done. I segment the sign there. This is a measure of the complexity to this but I just wanted to show you one bit of retelling of the story of a certain segment. So I'm just taking out this one segment here where the rabbit is asleep and the turtle passes by. I have examples of the signing of a child who had deaf parents, a child who had hearing parents with sign at home and a child who's hearing parents didn't sign. And I'm going to be comparing the child who had deaf parents with the child who had hearing parents who did not sign and see the comparison of how much was how many features per T-unit each child signed and if we compare them we see that the child who had deaf parents had 5.40 features per T-unit and the child who had hearing parents who didn't sign had 3.67 so we see that the child who had deaf parents is much more elaborated system. Now these are studies of individual children. First child had deaf parents, the second child had hearing parents who signed, the third child who had hearing parents who didn't sign. Now we've on the x-axis you see fall and spring as the two labels. Fall represents the pre-test that we gave the children at the beginning of the year and then after their experience in the lab and in the program we gave them a protest in the spring and those are the two points in time that we tested. It's quite interesting to look at the difference because you see that in the beginning there was a great variance between the three children in the fall. However this is much smaller in the spring. In the fall the child who had hearing parents had about 2.5 and the child with deaf parents had about 6.5 but in the spring you see that that changes and that the child who had hearing parents who didn't sign increased quite a bit almost and seems to be trying to catch up with the children who have signing parents. So they performed a lot of statistics on these data and analyzed them divided the children into three groups A, B, and C. Those are the children who have deaf parents, the children who have hearing parents who sign and the children who have deaf parents who don't sign and they separate them individually. We see in the beginning that two of the students have two points something but in the spring a student who started with a two point something became as proficient as the students who had deaf parents and kind of joined their group. When we look at the children C1 and C3 we see they also improved but not quite as much. They became as proficient as the children who were in group B during the fall. Now we look at B2 we see one of the children became as proficient as the children who had deaf parents but B1 and B3 seemed not to improve that much. They did improve yes, but they didn't they didn't become more proficient than the children in their own group and didn't move into the next group but when I looked at their experience I realized that the first child had only one and a half years of experience in our program and the first child only one year should have been very new to the program and so it seems like that they needed more time in the program in order to fully acquire the language and you see the children who had stars by the name had the full two years experience and we look at the children who had deaf parents and they had that by the springtime they had 8.626.95 as their score and I wondered if maybe that means that they had achieved proficiency in ASL so to test this I looked at a professional storyteller and did the same sort of analysis on that professional storyteller that I did on the children. I used the same rabbit turtle story as well and he averaged 5.0 features per T compared to the best childhood deaf parents which was 8.62 which was much more proficient than the children of deaf parents Sam? So in summary what does this mean? It means that there are various layers and students can move through those layers in language acquisition means that the lab helps them with language acquisition however that necessarily was storytelling we can discuss the techniques and what those looks like and provide support systems for that but it's the level of language acquisition that students experience really does depend on the level of time that they're involved with the program itself remember the goal is to have them all at the same level but if the mother and father are deaf they have more time to progress 90% of the students have hearing students and 10% have deaf and the idea is to get them all to 100% that is the goal to get them all to the same language level but does that mean that that it's that the language acquisition is complete? No they need to continue the process in the classroom they need to make a transfer from the activities in the lab into the classroom so in summary remember in the beginning we talked about our question the feasibility issue so deaf children of deaf parents yes it seems that they can learn ASL deaf children of hearing parents can learn ASL and what might that program look like the sign language services that are needed the third aspect was the effectiveness yes we've seen students that can jump between groups that they were able to proceed progress upward in their language development but we need to have more time to see the actual final results it's unfortunate the program was closed and also we looked at deaf children of hearing parents only we didn't look at we didn't do the comparison of deaf children of deaf parents we wanted to do deaf children of deaf parents going through this program but we still have not done that yet we need to set that up this year and the program had been closed we needed to take that group all the way through this there was no there was no support through the program the teacher had not gone through the entire progress process the teachers didn't support the program only the superintendent did we have to keep sign language so the sign language services aren't enough we need to continue deaf education