Deaf ESL Students - Gallaudet University

Dialogue Journals...
For Students, Teachers,
and Parents
Meeting Students Where They Are
By David R. Schleper
For Teachers and Students
Many students who start school in
the middle of the year must face
the jitters. For 14-year-old Claudette*,
the jitters must have been particularly
intense. Claudette had left her home in
Burundi, a small country in central
Africa, only days before. When she
entered my classroom at the Model
Secondary School for the Deaf (MSSD),
on the campus of Gallaudet University,
it was already February. The second
semester of English was well underway—and
Claudette was walking
into an American high school for
the first time.
She knew no English and no
American Sign Language. The
youngest in a family with deaf brothers
and sisters, she had a facility with gesture
and many home signs. She could
list her family members and mère and
père were among the smattering of
Spring 2000
vocabulary she had in French. I, her
teacher, knew no French except oui.
Yikes.
After welcoming Claudette to the
class and introducing her to the other
students, I handed her an empty notebook
filled with lined paper—her first
dialogue journal. For several years, dialogue
journals have been used with
deaf and hard of hearing children to
help them learn English (Bailes, 1999;
Bailes, Searls, Slobodzian, & Staton,
1986). They have also been used with
students from other countries to help
them learn English (Peyton, 1990;
Peyton & Reed, 1990). I had used dialogue
journals with many of my students
with success. From the first day, I
decided to see how journal writing
would work with Claudette.
I mimed writing on the empty page,
passing the journal to her and then
receiving it back. The other students
showed her their journals. Claudette
looked at the journals with their different
colored ink and occasional artwork.
She accepted her own notebook.
Her first entry came soon afterward.
2/12 I like school a lot.
I read it with the other journal
entries, at home that evening. When we
first started dialogue journals, I asked
the students to write in class and occasionally
I did the same. By now we had
the system down. For most kids it meant
writing every other day for homework. I
wrote back to them from home and
returned their journals at school. As a
teacher, I reinforced what Claudette
said and then added some more.
2/15 Hi Claudette!
I’m glad that you like school a
lot. I like to teach school, too.
11