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Robert J. Hoffmeister is associate professor emeritus and former director of the Center for the Study of Communication & Deafness at Boston University. [1] He is most known for his book, Journey into the Deaf World . He is also known for supporting the American deaf community and deaf education.
Hoffmeister grew up at the residential American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, Connecticut. His parents were both teachers at the school and were both deaf. Hoffmeister attended the University of Connecticut, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and Language. He received his master's degree in Deaf Education from the University of Arizona in the following year and his doctorate in psychology, and Language and the Deaf in 1978 from the University of Minnesota. [2]
In 1980 at Boston University he created the first university major and specialization in Deaf Studies. [3] He was a director of Programs in Deaf Studies until 2008. From 1979 to 2008, he was also director for the Graduate Program for Education of the Deaf and ASL/ Deaf Studies.
He is an associate professor emeritus and the former director of the Center for the Study of Communication and Deafness at Boston University. [4] According to Boston University he has done studies in the following areas:"the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by Deaf children; Deaf people as a bilingual/bicultural minority group; problems in the education of the Deaf; the effects of implementing public laws on Deaf children; and the improvement of interactions between Hearing parents and their Deaf children" [5] His most well known written work is the book Journey Into the Deaf-World, which he coauthored with Harlan Lane and Ben Bahan.
He is currently director emeritus of the Center for Research and Training, a department of The Learning Center for Deaf in Framingham, Massachusetts. [6]
His most well known book, A Journey into the Deaf World, is written by two scholars, one of whom is deaf and one hearing, and Hoffmeister himself, who is a child of a deaf adult. Applying modern social theories, Hoffmeister and his coauthors offer insights into the deaf world, the community that it is made up of, and the benefits brought to the community by the language it uses (American Sign Language). The book also refers to the topics of education of deaf children, how deaf people assimilated into wider society, the natural development of ASL, the pros and cons of technology for deaf individuals, what can be learned from deaf societies in other countries, and what the deaf world holds in the future. This book is very popular for those who want to learn about the deaf world. [7]
Another notable written work that Hoffmeister is known for is the chapter that he contributed in the book called Manual Communication Implications for Education, where he explains the ups and downs of the use of ASL in the education of deaf children, as well as the structure of ASL: its phonological and morphological components, classifiers and sentence level structure. Lastly, the chapter explains bilingual and bicultural programs in deaf education. [8]
In the book Cross-Cultural Misinformation: What Does Special Education Say About Deaf People Hoffmeister shows how society views deafness. This book explains the information presented in special education text books to determine how issues surrounding deaf persons are presented. He evaluates thirteen special education text books to analyze whether it presents a pathological view or cultural view on deaf children. The majority of the text books focused on the idea that deaf people need to be cured, rather than focusing on the fact that deaf people have their own language and culture. From Hoffmeister's viewpoint, there is no input in these textbooks from the deaf community, and in some cases there is active avoidance to include the viewpoints of deaf people. [9]
Hoffmeister co-wrote the article Language and Theory of Mind: A Study of Deaf Children with Brenda Schick, Peter De Villers and Jill De Villers. The article summarized their study on Theory of mind (ToM) abilities in deaf children. 176 deaf children of varying ages participated in the study, with some as old as eight years of age and some as young as three. The children either used American Sign Language (ASL) or oral English, and some had hearing parents, while others had deaf parents. The study concluded that "there was a significant delay on ToM tasks in deaf children of hearing parents, who typically demonstrate language delays, regardless of whether they used spoken English or ASL. In contrast, deaf children from deaf families performed identically to same-aged hearing controls (N=42)." [10] Moreover, both understanding of syntactic and vocabulary were predictors of verbal and low-verbal ToM tasks success.
In the book Language Acquisition by Eye Hoffmeister explains how deaf children learn literacy skills, including reading skills as well as literacy skills in American Sign Language (ASL), which have only recently been identified. According to Hoffmeister, language and literacy skills in ASL in deaf education have not been recognized as having the potential impact of helping deaf children acquire English literacy skills, despite the fact that ASL is the most widely used language among deaf people in the US and Canada. Furthermore, the support of using ASL in the class room has not been agreed on because there is no shared written form of the language. [11]
In Why Schools for Deaf Children Should Hire Deaf Teachers: A Preschool Issue Hoffmeister, along with his coauthor Courtney Shantie, determines that bilingual education for deaf children is the best way for them to learn. He argues that the best role models for deaf children are those who use American Sign Language (ASL) in early education, which means that deaf students' preschool teachers should be native signers. Additionally, he discusses the problems that exist using manual codes of English for the education of deaf children. [12]
In the book Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, Hoffmeister explains the lives of hearing children of deaf parents (HCDP). He relates HCDP's lives to living on the "border", and also examines the lives of minority groups in the US and their managing of two cultures. Hoffmeister explains that the concept of border refers to a Venn diagram, where the deaf and HCDP are not exclusive to each other, but have both overlapping and separate components. [13]
Hoffmeister studies how deaf children think using ASL, as well as how hearing people acquire ASL as a second language, and the most difficult environments for learning ASL. He also developed the American Sign Language Assessment Instrument (ASLAI), which began in 1988. [14] This is used to measure the different levels of signing skills in children who are deaf. Lastly, he studies how deaf children use ASL to learn English. [15]
Hoffmeister has received several awards. In 2010, he received "The Frederick C. Schreiber Award" from the National Association for the Deaf, presented in memory of Frederick C. Schreiber, their first executive director, [16] for the advancement of civil rights, human rights, and linguistic rights of Americans who are deaf and hard of hearing. He also received "The Distinguished Service Award" and "The Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet Award" in recognition of his commitment to the deaf community. [17]
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.
Sign languages are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication. When used as a cultural label especially within the culture, the word deaf is often written with a capital D and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. When used as a label for the audiological condition, it is written with a lower case d. Carl G. Croneberg coined the term "Deaf Culture" and he was the first to discuss analogies between Deaf and hearing cultures in his appendices C/D of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language.
Signing Exact English is a system of manual communication that strives to be an exact representation of English vocabulary and grammar. It is one of a number of such systems in use in English-speaking countries. It is related to Seeing Essential English (SEE-I), a manual sign system created in 1945, based on the morphemes of English words. SEE-II models much of its sign vocabulary from American Sign Language (ASL), but modifies the handshapes used in ASL in order to use the handshape of the first letter of the corresponding English word.
Harlan Lawson Lane was an American psychologist. Lane was the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and founder of the Center for Research in Hearing, Speech, and Language. His research was focused on speech, Deaf culture, and sign language.
Irving King Jordan is an American educator who became the first deaf president of Gallaudet University in 1988 after the Deaf President Now protest. Gallaudet is the world's only university with all programs and services designed specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.
Audism as described by deaf activists is a form of discrimination directed against deaf people, which may include those diagnosed as deaf from birth, or otherwise. Tom L. Humphries coined the term in his doctoral dissertation in 1975, but it did not start to catch on until Harlan Lane used it in his writing. Humphries originally applied audism to individual attitudes and practices; whereas Lane broadened the term to include oppression of deaf people.
Thai Sign Language (TSL), or Modern Standard Thai Sign Language (MSTSL), is the national sign language of Thailand's deaf community and is used in most parts of the country by the 20 percent of the estimated 56,000 pre-linguistically deaf people who go to school. Thai Sign Language was acknowledged as "the national language of deaf people in Thailand" in August 1999, in a resolution signed by the Minister of Education on behalf of the Royal Thai Government. As with many sign languages, the means of transmission to children occurs within families with signing deaf parents and in schools for the deaf. A robust process of language teaching and acculturation among deaf children has been documented and photographed in the Thai residential schools for the deaf.
Bimodal bilingualism is an individual or community's bilingual competency in at least one oral language and at least one sign language, which utilize two different modalities. An oral language consists of an vocal-aural modality versus a signed language which consists of a visual-spatial modality A substantial number of bimodal bilinguals are children of deaf adults (CODA) or other hearing people who learn sign language for various reasons. Deaf people as a group have their own sign language(s) and culture that is referred to as Deaf, but invariably live within a larger hearing culture with its own oral language. Thus, "most deaf people are bilingual to some extent in [an oral] language in some form" In discussions of multilingualism in the United States, bimodal bilingualism and bimodal bilinguals have often not been mentioned or even considered, in part because American Sign Language, the predominant sign language used in the U.S., only began to be acknowledged as a natural language in the 1960s. However, bimodal bilinguals share many of the same traits as traditional bilinguals, as well as differing in some interesting ways, due to the unique characteristics of the Deaf community. Bimodal bilinguals also experience similar neurological benefits as do unimodal bilinguals, with significantly increased grey matter in various brain areas and evidence of increased plasticity as well as neuroprotective advantages that can help slow or even prevent the onset of age-related cognitive diseases, such as Alzheimer's and dementia.
Bilingual–Bicultural or Bi-Bi deaf education programs use sign language as the native, or first, language of Deaf children. In the United States, for example, Bi-Bi proponents claim that American Sign Language (ASL) should be the natural first language for deaf children in the United States, despite the majority of deaf and hard of hearing being born to hearing parents. In this same vein, the spoken or written language used by the majority of the population is viewed as a secondary language to be acquired either after or at the same time as the native language.
Singapore Sign Language, or SgSL, is the native sign language used by the deaf and hard of hearing in Singapore, developed over six decades since the setting up of the first school for the Deaf in 1954. Since Singapore's independence in 1965, the Singapore deaf community has had to adapt to many linguistic changes. Today, the local deaf community recognises Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) as a reflection of Singapore's diverse linguistic culture. SgSL is influenced by Shanghainese Sign Language (SSL), American Sign Language (ASL), Signing Exact English (SEE-II) and locally developed signs. The total number of deaf clients registered with The Singapore Association For The Deaf (SADeaf), an organisation that advocates equal opportunity for the deaf, is 5,756, as of 2014. Among which, only about one-third stated their knowledge of Sign Language.
Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development is the school of education within Boston University. It is located on the University's Charles River Campus in Boston, Massachusetts in the former Lahey Clinic building. BU Wheelock has more than 31,000 alumni, 65 full-time faculty and both undergraduate and graduate students. Boston University School of Education was ranked 34th in the nation in 2018 by U.S. News & World Report in their rankings of graduate schools of education. The School of Education is a member institution of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).
Deaf education is the education of students with any degree of hearing loss or deafness. This may involve, but does not always, individually-planned, systematically-monitored teaching methods, adaptive materials, accessible settings, and other interventions designed to help students achieve a higher level of self-sufficiency and success in the school and community than they would achieve with a typical classroom education. There are different language modalities used in educational setting where students get varied communication methods. A number of countries focus on training teachers to teach deaf students with a variety of approaches and have organizations to aid deaf students.
American Sign Language literature is one of the most important shared cultural experiences in the American Deaf community. Literary genres initially developed in residential Deaf institutes, such as American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which is where American Sign Language developed as a language in the early 19th century. There are many genres of ASL literature, such as narratives of personal experience, poetry, cinematographic stories, folktales, translated works, original fiction and stories with handshape constraints. Authors of ASL literature use their body as the text of their work, which is visually read and comprehended by their audience viewers. In the early development of ASL literary genres, the works were generally not analyzed as written texts are, but the increased dissemination of ASL literature on video has led to greater analysis of these genres.
Ella Mae Lentz is a Deaf American author, poet, teacher, and advocate.
Benjamin James Bahan is a professor of ASL and Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University and a member of the deaf community. He is an influential figure in American Sign Language literature as a storyteller and writer of deaf culture. He is known for the stories "The Ball Story" and "Birds of a Different Feather". He is known for writing the book A Journey into the Deaf-World (1996) with Robert J. Hoffmeister and Harlan Lane. Bahan also co-wrote and co-directed the film Audism Unveiled (2008) with his colleague Dirksen Bauman.
Language acquisition is a natural process in which infants and children develop proficiency in the first language or languages that they are exposed to. The process of language acquisition is varied among deaf children. Deaf children born to deaf parents are typically exposed to a sign language at birth and their language acquisition following a typical developmental timeline. However, at least 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who use a spoken language at home. Hearing loss prevents many deaf children from hearing spoken language to the degree necessary for language acquisition. For many deaf children, language acquisition is delayed until the time that they are exposed to a sign language or until they begin using amplification devices such as hearing aids or cochlear implants. Deaf children who experience delayed language acquisition, sometimes called language deprivation, are at risk for lower language and cognitive outcomes.
Language deprivation in deaf and hard-of-hearing children often occurs when sufficient exposure to any language, spoken or signed, is not provided in the first few years of life. Language development may be severely delayed from the lack of language exposure during this period. This was observed in well-known clinical case studies such as Genie, Kaspar Hauser, Anna, and Isabelle, as well as cases analyzing feral children such as Victor. All of these children had typical hearing yet did not develop language typically due to language deprivation.
Language exposure for children is the act of making language readily available and accessible during the critical period for language acquisition. Deaf and hard of hearing children, when compared to their hearing peers, tend to face more hardships when it comes to ensuring that they will receive accessible language during their formative years. Therefore, deaf and hard of hearing children are more likely to have language deprivation which causes cognitive delays. Early exposure to language enables the brain to fully develop cognitive and linguistic skills as well as language fluency and comprehension later in life. Hearing parents of deaf and hard of hearing children face unique barriers when it comes to providing language exposure for their children. Yet, there is a lot of research, advice, and services available to those parents of deaf and hard of hearing children who may not know how to start in providing language.
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