Confronting Assumptions in Immigrant Multilingual Deaf Education: Redefining Deaf Education

Introduction

Bilingual Deaf education is an educational approach to the education of Deaf and hard of hearing learners, which recognizes and uses both the native sign language of the Deaf community and the country’s majority written/spoken language (Regan, 2015). Examples of existing bilingual education frameworks include American Sign Language and English, British Sign Language and English, and Mexican Sign Language/El Lenguaje de Signos Mexicano (LSM) and Spanish. Institutions adopting these bilingual frameworks experience a new student population, immigrant multilingual D/HH learners whose language and literacy needs go beyond the implemented bilingual frameworks (Cannon & Luckner, 2016; García-Fernández, 2014; Gerner de Garcia, 1995; Musyoka & Adeoye, 2020). The term multilingual is used interchangeably in literature to refer to bilingual (Aronin & Singleton, 2008; Cenoz, 2013). In this chapter, the term multilingualism will refer to more than two languages. The distinction between bilingual and multilingual is critical in explaining an underserved, linguistic deficit and underachievement in certain groups of D/HH learners, thus bringing the immigrant multilingual aspect into the research of Deaf education.

In the US, the population of immigrant children increased by 50% from 1994-2017 (Child Trends, 2018). This increase is changing the learners’ population in the US; by fall 2025, the percentage of learners of color enrolled in public schools is projected to increase to 54% (Snyder etal., 2016). Growing immigration trends indicate that the US is becoming a linguistically diverse and multilingual country (Rumbaut & Massey, 2013). With these changes, projections indicate that, by 2030, the proportion of children enrolled in formal education who speak languages other than English (LOTE) at home will rise to 40% (Crawford, 2013). According to the US census, about 21% of the population speaks a LOTE at home (US Department of Commerce Bureau of Census, 2015). The data shows that about 38 million people speak Spanish at home, 3 million speak Chinese, more than 2 million use Hindi/Urdu and Arabic (The US Department of Commerce Bureau of Census, 2015). Also, 9% of the learners in K-12 public schools who speak LOTE are in English Language Learners (ELLs) classrooms (US Department of Commerce Bureau of Census, 2015).

Multilingual, immigrant D/HH learners in the US are part of the increasing population whose first language is not English and ASL, the two languages included in the bilingual framework adopted by American schools (Cannon & Luckner, 2016; Gerner de Garcia, 1995; Howerton-Fox & Falk, 2019; Musyoka & Adeoye, 2020; Pizzo, 2016). ASL serves as the medium of instruction while English is learned via reading and writing (LaSasso & Lollis, 2003). With American D/HH learners, ASL is their first language and written English, their second. For Deaf learners, it is their linguistic human right to learn in their first language (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994). Learning through a second will naturally be a struggle until they are proficient. But what about multilingual, immigrant Deaf learners? What is their linguistic human right?