Signing Exact English
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Signing Exact English (SEE) is a system of manual communication that strives to be an exact representation of English vocabulary and grammar - one of a number of such systems known collectively as Manually Coded English. It is an artificial system that was devised in 1972. It takes much of its vocabulary of signs from American Sign Language (ASL). However, it often modifies the handshapes used in the ASL signs in order to incorporate the handshape used for the first letter of the English word that the SEE sign is meant to represent. Many new signs were invented however, especially signs for grammatical concepts. SEE can be thought of as a code for visually representing spoken English, developed primarily for use in deaf education.
In the USA, it is known as Signed Exact English (SEE). In the United Kingdom they refer to Sign Supported English (SSE) and Signed Exact English. Australia has its own Signed English, developed by a committee in the 1970s. New Zealand has its own system again.
These systems for visually representing the English language are used most often with deaf children in educational settings. They often find use in the home too, however, as they are often welcomed as an alternative to natural sign languages by hearing parents of deaf children because they does not require them to learn a new grammar or syntax. Therefore, SEE and its variants are easy to quickly learn for people who have already internalized English. It is not often used by adult deaf people except to communicate with hearing people who know some sign but who are not fluent users of sign language.
The use of Signed English is controversial. Many deaf people complain that it is awkward and difficult to sign, and that it is an attempt to replace their own native sign languages and that it works to separate deaf children from deaf culture, exposure to which is imperative in order to complete healthy development. However it is advocated by some educators as a way of providing deaf children with access to a visual form of the English language.
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Advantages
- SEE sign shows fully the use of articles and prepositions to deaf children who often have difficulty learning the correct usage of these parts of the English language.
- SEE is easy for English speaking parents and teachers of deaf children to master quickly.
Disadvantages
- SEE is much slower than natural speech or ASL unless it abandons its stricture to be faithful to spoken English and becomes more ASL-like.
- SEE has no community of adult users and is not part of a flourishing culture as is the case for both English and ASL
- SEE cannot faithfully show every aspect of spoken English
Educational controversy
As with almost every aspect of the education of deaf children, the use of SEE is mired in controversy concerning its efficacy and utility. In a way, it is a slight variation of the oralist vs. manualist controversy which has pitted those that have supported the use of sign language against those that believed in lipreading and speech therapy as the best way to educate deaf children. This debate has raged for two centuries.
Supporters of ASL or the manualists claim that SEE and it's cohort system, Cued Speech, robs children of belonging to a culture that they can fully participate in, is hard for deaf children to master and does not result in those children being competent with English. Further, since the introduction of the Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Epee's methodical signs in the 1760s and their continuance by his successor, the Abbe Roch-Ambroise Sicard, scholars in deaf education have continually said that such systems are actually accommodations for the hearing teachers who have not learned the natural language of the deaf because of the great difficulty they encountered in doing so. Indeed, while deaf children are instructed using SEE so as to learn English, they receive no instruction in ASL whatsoever and must acquire it from other students and deaf adults who are present in the educational environment. Still further, they claim its use is a disrespectful attempt to change deaf children into hearing ones as much as is possible with great harm to the intellectual and emotional development of the children involved. It is often cited as a great irony that when hearing people use their mastery of their native language as a bridge to learning a second language, the world's universal embrace of applying this method of language acquisition is considered fundamental to all mankind with the exception of the deaf, whose natural language is the language of signs. Deaf people see themselves being subjected to the reverse of this long-accepted rule of language acquisition.
Tremendous confusion is cited by the deaf also since, while in the process of acquiring SEE, the teacher often reverts to explaining the system in Signed English which permits the teacher to simultaneously speak while using manual communication. Since Signed English, itself, is often unintelligible to the deaf, they find themselves gathering after classroom instruction to work out not only the the lessons in SEE, but also what the teacher was saying in Signed English, and the children themselves work out both problems using ASL. The extraordinary tedium in learning SEE, translated in part by Signed English, and finally translated again into ASL makes for a perplexing burden on young deaf children that is not placed on hearing children. It accounts for very low rates of literacy among the deaf and, according to surveys of hearing teachers of the deaf, a high level of job dissatisfaction.
Finally, deaf people explain that SEE, itself, has added to a tremendous corruption or confusion of ASL. Casual acquisition of a signed language by hearing people is common. These casual learners are often taught the SEE equivalent of an ASL sign, such as the initialized "he" signed in SEE from the forehead using the "H" handshape as opposed to the ASL sign "he" made by pointing the index finger at a person or at a designed point in space. Casual learners generalize upon such SEE signs to think that personal pronouns are initialized and that they belong to the vocabulary of ASL when, in fact, they do not. Since deaf people are most often in the role of accommodating hearing people with whom the are communicating, they accommodate these errors even when they recognize them as errors and thus doing, reinforce the misunderstanding about the nature of signs. Added to this is the problem that, since ASL is almost never an academic subject in the education of the deaf, the deaf themselves often cannot explain the errors to hearing people and by this omission permit errors in signing to persist.
Supporters of SEE claim that it helps children to integrate into the wider culture and is an important part of becoming competent with English which is the key to success in the professional world as well as being integral in a person's ability to function in other aspects of the dominant culture which surrounds them.
See also
External links
- The official SEE website (http://www.seecenter.org/info.htm)
Further reading
- MacDougall, James C.: The development of the Australasian signed English system. In: Australian Teacher of the Deaf 29 (1988) - pp. 18-36