Comments on: English: The Official Language… in school? http://www.chipanglish.com/education/english_only_school/ Blogging semi-coherently in Chinese, Japanese, and English Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:14:42 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Elenita http://www.chipanglish.com/education/english_only_school/#comment-56 Elenita Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:54:36 +0000 http://www.chipanglish.com/?p=259#comment-56 This is deserving of its own post, but I wonder how a hypothetical deaf student might have changed things in said classroom. I know a lot of hearing people consider ASL an adaptation or "translation" of English, but the consensus in the deaf community is that ASL is its own language. If there had been a deaf student, would he/she have insisted on his/her right to not use English in the classroom? Or would the teacher have insisted such a student leave and not be able to participate for the sake of language purity? Ugh. At least we have some hope: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/23english.html" rel="nofollow">Nashville voters recently rejected an English-only measure</a>. This is deserving of its own post, but I wonder how a hypothetical deaf student might have changed things in said classroom. I know a lot of hearing people consider ASL an adaptation or “translation” of English, but the consensus in the deaf community is that ASL is its own language. If there had been a deaf student, would he/she have insisted on his/her right to not use English in the classroom? Or would the teacher have insisted such a student leave and not be able to participate for the sake of language purity? Ugh.

At least we have some hope: Nashville voters recently rejected an English-only measure.

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