practices - Gallaudet University

Bob Rittenhouse,
Ph.D., is regional
superintendent of The
Arizona State Schools
for the Deaf and the
Blind, in Tucson. He
welcomes comments
about this article via
e-mail: BRittenhouse@
ASDB.state.az.us.
Melissa Jenkins,
M.S., is a former teacher
of deaf students. She is
presently a private
consultant in Little
Rock, Arkansas.
Jess Dancer,
Ed.D., is professor of
audiology and holds
joint appointments
with the University of
Arkansas at Little Rock
and the University of
Arkansas for Medical
Sciences. He welcomes
comments about this
article:
jedancer@ualr.edu.
Top right: Children
work on developing
their skills in
reading, writing, and
storytelling.
Photos courtesy of
Bob Rittenhouse.
28
defining
the journey
comparing
comprehension in
AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE
AND SIGNED ENGLISH
STORYTELLING
By Bob Rittenhouse, Melissa Jenkins, and Jess Dancer
Jean Andrews (1994) and others found that children who were presented
with a summary of fables in American Sign Language (ASL) prior to
reading demonstrated greater comprehension of the stories, improved
their retelling scores, and understood better the moral lesson that the
fable illustrated.
When we reviewed this research, we realized that it had begun to support ASL as a
medium for storytelling with deaf children. For example, David Stewart (1985) had 36
deaf children (between 12 and 16 years of age) retell stories presented in both ASL and
Signed English. While Stewart divided the children into those who tended to use ASL
and those who tended to use Signed English, he found that all the children, when given a
choice, retold the stories in ASL. Brown, Fisher, & Janus (1991) asked 40 deaf adults to
read and retell stories and found that those who chose to tell the stories in ASL were
more explicit in rendering story details. For example, they differentiated among
instruments—in one case, where users of Signed English remained general in referring to
a “cutting tool,” the students who used ASL said explicitly that the tool was a “knife.”
In light of this provocative and, we felt, compelling research, we decided to set up an
experiment as part of regular classroom instruction where we would compare students’
comprehension when they were presented with stories through the media of Signed
English and ASL.
We worked with 11 deaf students, six to eight years of age; eight were profoundly
deaf and had deaf fathers who used sign language to communicate. The signing skills of
the other parents varied greatly. A few were proficient in sign language. Most knew
survival signs. All signed some.
We introduced the stories in a language or language system that we felt the students
best comprehended. This was to help our students understand the stories better and
retell the stories themselves. Then the students were divided into two groups and each
group took a turn watching the ASL and Signed English rendition of the stories. One
group saw the ASL story first; the other saw the Signed English version first. Then they
switched, in a procedure researchers call “counterbalancing of conditions.”
Billy Seago, a skilled deaf actor, had recorded several short stories on videotape in
ASL and Signed English. The form of Signed English he selected incorporated verb
tense, suffixes, initialized signs, and a one-to-one correspondence with English
morphology, a form similar to SEE 1. These stories were: This is the House that Jack
Built; The Greedy Cat; Village Stew; The Father, Son, and Donkey; and The Magic Pot. Each
video is about 20 minutes in length and the stories rendered in each video are of similar
conceptual depth and intricacy.
ODYSSEY WINTER 2002