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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 5:1 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press

The Use of ASL to Support the Development of English and Literacy

Ronnie B. Wilbur

Purdue University

The purpose of this article is to review research dealing with the use of ASL in teaching English and literacy. I review some of the literature (and direct readers to additional sources) that indicates that early learning of ASL need not create concerns for future development of English structure, speech, or other cognitive skills. I also suggest ways in which ASL can contribute directly to developing more of the highlevel skills needed for fluent reading and writing. The global benefit of learning ASL as a first language is that it creates a standard bilingual situation in which teachers and learners can take advantage of one language to assist in acquiring the other and in the transfer of general knowledge. As part of this discussion, I compare English and ASL as natural languages for similarities and differences.

Research on ASL syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic structure was funded in part by NIH grant R01-DC00935 from the National Institute of Deafness and other Communication Disorders. Prior work on ASL syllables was funded by NSF grant BNS-8317572. Additional support was provided by WIRCO.

Correspondence should be sent to Ronnie B. Wilbur, Purdue University, ASL Linguistics Laboratory, Heavilon Hall, W. Lafayette, IN 47907-1353 (e-mail: wilbur{at}omni.cc.purdue.edu ).

Received May 19, 1999; revised July 26, 1999; accepted July 27, 1999


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