High schools nationwide are adopting American Sign Language as an alternative for students who need a foreign language to graduate…
The classroom at Bronx Leadership Academy II was silent as Arsenio Merced, 17, stood in the front of the room and told a story. When he finished, his
fellow students, instead of clapping, held up their hands and shook them around.
Merced, a junior, is taking American Sign Language at this public school in the South Bronx section of New York City. Starting this academic year, students
at Bronx Leadership can select American Sign Language to fulfill their language requirement instead of more traditional, spoken languages.
“Most of the students are here because they had trouble in other languages,” said David Buie, 29, the school’s sign language instructor. “They seem to be
doing a lot better here than they did in Spanish or French.”
For the last two years, Buie has been teaching ASL as an elective, or what the school calls a club, at Bronx Leadership. Students who join the club learn
basic vocabulary, and Buie teaches them a popular song of their choosing. Last year the students learned “Irreplaceable” by Beyonce, performing the song for
the whole school at the end of the semester.
But this year, the school approached Buie, who has been studying ASL since 2005, to redesign the class from a club that meets once a week to a formal
language course that counts toward graduation.
Merced decided to take the class not because he was having trouble in other languages, but because his aunt is deaf, and both her children are fluent in sign
language.
“I wanted to learn it so I can talk to my aunt,” he said. “And by luck, I can teach it to some of my cousins.”
Merced said, with a deaf member of his family, he had always wanted to learn ASL but didn’t know where to take lessons. His aunt had a book, but it wasn’t
enough to teach him.
“When I heard I could take it here, I was really interested,” he said. “I wanted to learn more.”
Bronx Leadership Academy II is one of a rapidly growing number of high schools across America that are using ASL as a foreign-language requirement. In 2000,
according to a survey of state education departments by Teachers College at Columbia University, there were 456 high schools that taught ASL, not including
high schools targeted toward deaf students. By 2004, the number had jumped to 701.
Steve Ackley, director of communications for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, in Alexandria, Va., said this sudden rise helped
bring about his organization’s recent recognition of ASL as an official foreign language.
The council never deliberately left ASL teachers out, he said. “But there was a growing interest, a growing number of people in the ASL community that asked
us to support it.”
Ackley said there was no opposition he could recall from inside or outside of his organization when it adopted the stance that sign language is a foreign
language.
The council believes that ASL teachers are a legitimate part of the foreign-language community, he said, “and since we are the umbrella organization for all
languages at all levels, it was a natural progression for them to become part of that.”
Geoffrey Poor, associate professor in the department of sign language and interpreting services at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in
Rochester, N.Y., said in an e-mail that in the linguistics community, the issue of ASL as a foreign language was “laid to rest” with the publication of A
Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles in 1965 by William Stokoe, a sign language teacher at what is now Gallaudet University, the
world-renowned university for the deaf in Washington, D.C. But in popular culture, he said, those who accept ASL as a foreign language are harder to come by.
“For a long time people figured, out of ignorance, that it was just miming, broken English, etc.,” he said about ASL. “However, there is no deaf cuisine or
clothing or country,” which, Poor believes, is why “many people have resisted giving it a foreign-language status.”
Resistance to ASL seems to be waning. As of 2006, 41 states had approved of adding ASL to the foreign-language curriculum, with Nebraska being the most
recent addition.
“A group of hard-of-hearing and not-hard-of-hearing people wanted to encourage more people to go into sign language,” said Jim Scheer, member of the Nebraska
State Board of Education. He said the group wanted to encourage people to not only work in the deaf community, but also gain a skill that would give them a
competitive edge in other professional fields, such as medicine and social work.
“The only problem we encountered was to teach the course, you need to be a certified teacher,” Scheer said.
Scheer explained that a teacher needs a college degree or an official endorsement, and there is only one college in the state, the University of Nebraska at
Omaha, that teaches ASL. Right now, he said, only two high schools offer courses in ASL, but the hope is that since state approval, certified teachers from
outside Nebraska will be attracted to the state.
“It’s like the chicken and the egg,” he said. “No teachers are currently certified, but we might give people interested in ASL an opportunity to get a degree
and come back to teach.”
At Bronx Leadership Academy II, outside of Buie’s classroom, all the students have posted their names on a bulletin board with the various hand signs
spelling out each one. Inside, they go over vocabulary words for an upcoming quiz. Merced eagerly shouts the words as Buie signs them out.
“This means a lot to me right now,” Merced said. “This is the reason I am doing this. Sometimes it will be hard, but I will take the chance.”
