Hands On: Can Sign Language Help ELLs Learn English?

By Sarah Auerbach, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer

Wendy Meister, a veteran ESL teacher, had tried every trick in the book, but she couldn't get Jessica to speak English. The high school sophomore, whose home language was Spanish, had been nearly silent for two years. "Maybe she would get one word out," said Meister. "Very rarely could I get her to say anything other than 'yes,' or 'Mrs.' It was crazy."

After two years of trying to draw her student out, Meister had just about given up. Instead, she had turned her energies to another project. As part of an ongoing effort to teach her Vernon Hills, Ill., high school students American culture and American ideas, Meister began a unit focused on inclusion of those with disabilities. She introduced her students to the hearing-impaired and deaf students in the program down the hall. Then she handed out an essay arguing that sign language should be taught as a foreign language in American high schools. She invited a sign language interpreter into her lower-level ESL classroom and read the essay out loud while the interpreter signed it. The kids were so taken with the sign language-"How do you say 'Korean' in sign language?" "How do you say 'Chinese'?" "How do you say my name?"-that Meister never got around to her planned lesson, teaching the kids the structure of the five-paragraph essay. But despite the buzz in the classroom, Jessica never spoke.

On a whim, Meister decided to teach her students more signs. She learned some signs from dictionaries and online sites and others from the interpreters and teachers who worked down the hall. Then she began integrating the signs into her discussions of disability and inclusion. As the discussion progressed, she assigned silent Jessica and her classmates the story Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, about an adult, Charlie, with severe cognitive disabilities who gets a brief glimpse of what it would be like to be without disabilities. During a discussion of the book, Meister asked her students, "How do you think Charlie felt?"

Jessica's hand shot up.

Meister, stunned, called on her silent student, and Jessica haltingly signed and said aloud, "Charlie felt bad because he could not communicate."

"It was the first time I'd heard this girl speak a complete sentence," says Meister.

Meister became hooked on the notion of using sign language to teach English, and she began to teach signs to accompany new vocabulary. Excitement about signing also spread among her colleagues, including science teacher Elissa Gong, who designed an ESL science course that incorporated signing. Every time Gong starts a new unit, she chooses pertinent vocabulary words and teaches those words-and their signs-to her students. The signs Meister and Gong use are from American Sign Language (ASL), a language of hand, arm, facial, and body gestures used by people who are deaf and hearing impaired. ASL has its own grammar, syntax, and word order, all distinct from English. But Meister and Gong actually teach their students Signed Exact English (SEE), a variant of ASL that places the signs in typical English word order.

Gong lists new vocabulary on the blackboard, and she and her students say and sign the words together. She and Meister believe there are many reasons that signing helps students learn vocabulary and incorporate the concepts that the vocabulary conveys. First of all, the physical act of signing helps plant vocabulary in students' minds. There are several reasons for this, says Pennsylvania State University researcher Marilyn Daniels, who, in studies done in the mid-1990s, found that teaching pre-kindergarten students to sign significantly increased their vocabularies. One reason is that students who commit a word to memory through multiple "modalities"-they hear, see, and "act out" the word-are more likely to remember it. Muscles have their own "memories," so it's also easier to recall a word if your hand "remembers" it. Another reason is that students can build and access the ASL memory store in the brain more quickly than they can their brand-new cache of English words. And once they remember the sign, the English word quickly follows.

There are other reasons that signing helps students incorporate both new words and new concepts, say Meister and Gong. The fact that so many signs are actions-the word for "eat," for example, mimes the act of eating-allows students to connect words with meanings, instead of just memorizing by rote. Also, when it comes to complex vocabulary, signs sometimes reveal the underlying structure-and thus meaning-of words, as with the science word "abiotic," which means "not living" and is signed as "not" and "living."

Meister says that above all, signs help kids grasp and communicate abstract, academic concepts even when their English language skills are still developing. Take the sign for music, she says, which is not unlike an orchestra conductor's arm gesture. The sign for poetry is nearly identical, with only the shape of the hand changing as the arm makes the same movement. "You change the 'M' hand to a 'P' and [the word] becomes 'poem,' and what is poetry but words and music?" says Meister. The similarity of the signs helps her teach the students the concept of "lyricism" in poetry. Or take the sign for "succession," which involves putting your hands up with elbows at 90 degrees and moving your arms from left to right. When you teach students that sign, they simultaneously incorporate the language arts concept of "successive ideas" (ideas that follow one from another, as in an essay) and the government and history concept of the succession of rulers. Teaching students about these kinds of connections in language and disciplines is crucial to preparing them for college, says Meister.

Gong also uses signing to help manage her classroom. "I get to ask that question you're never supposed to ask, 'Does everybody understand?'" she says. The kids use a small "yes" or "no" sign to respond, and only Gong can see the answers. She also sometimes asks students to sign their answers when the class goes over homework together, to let her see who comprehends the lesson. With younger children, teachers can ask students to sign "toilet" when they need to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. This helps reduce interruptions and gives children an expanded sense of control. Other widely used classroom management signs include "line up," "sit down," "be quiet," and "look at me."

The use of signs for classroom management, where the hand gestures are unaccompanied by English words, may be responsible for one of the criticisms leveled at the use of signs with ELLs: that signing discourages verbalization. Both Meister and Gong refute this claim, saying it's rare for a student to sign without speaking. When Meister was able, several years after the fact, to ask her silent student, Jessica, what had made it possible for her to speak her first sentence, Jessica said that the sign language had eliminated her fears of mispronouncing words and being misunderstood. Meister says that this is one key reason that sign language works to draw students out, particularly those from cultures in which students are taught not to raise their voices or assert themselves in other ways in class.

Even if the risk of cutting off spoken dialogue is relatively low, critics have other concerns about the use of sign language. ASL can be misused, says Judie Haynes, an ESL teacher with more than 26 years of teaching experience. Haynes raises some potential objections to using-or misusing-sign language in ESL programs. For one thing, she says, it can be a distraction from the business at hand. "Given the political realities of No Child Left Behind, and the rush to teach English to our students, we really need to concentrate," she says. "Another objection that I see is that our ELLs should be maintaining their own language-ideally they should be in bilingual programs-and there's no connection between ASL and the other languages of the world." Haynes also points out that teachers can use gestures or real objects instead of signs, with similar results and, possibly, less effort.

Unfortunately for Meister and others who use sign language in ESL classrooms, there's not a lot of research available to shore up their case. There is plenty of research touting the power of signing to help infants develop language. For example, a 2005 study by Jana M. Iverson of the University of Pittsburgh and Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago found that children who made advances in signing often subsequently made advances in spoken language. But much of the research to support the use of signing with older children is a decade old, like Marilyn Daniel's studies of pre-kindergarteners exposed to sign. And there is only one study that supports the use of signing with hearing ELLs, a 1999 study from the University of Kansas by Heather A. Schunk, "The Effect of Singing Paired with Signing on Receptive Vocabulary Skills of Elementary ESL Students."

With so little research available, proponents of sign must draw mainly from anecdotal evidence. Principal Wendy Crawford has been tracking test scores at Grenloch Terrace Early Education Center in Turnersville to see if signing is paying off there. Through her teaching staff, Crawford introduced signs to her whole student population, 550 kindergarten and 100 disabled preschool students. The students learn a large number of basic signs-classroom management, colors, numbers, calendar words, and the manual alphabet, among others. Crawford's population also includes between four and eight ELLs per year. Between 2000, when the students began signing, and 2006, the average number of words recognized by students on a simple word recognition vocabulary test rose from 81 percent to 93 percent. And, more to the point for teachers of ELLs, the ELLs' results surpassed the general population's on a number of assessments, including recognition of sight words, recognition of classroom words, and concepts about print.

It's difficult to quantify how widely signing is being used with ELLs in the United States. Meister and Gong can name only a few colleagues in other regions who have said they're using signs. Nor could researchers like Marilyn Daniels and another well-regarded practitioner, Laura Felzer, cite many examples of teachers who are currently using signs with ELLs. But Daniels insists that the practice is widespread. She says the best evidence she can give of its popularity is the fact that one introductory text on sign language, Sign for Me, contains an index that has now been translated into eight languages. "If Dawn Sign Press [the publisher of Sign for Me] has chosen to publish a book with indices in eight languages, they're not idly doing that; they're doing that because this is being used for English as a Second Language," Daniels says. When pressed on why the practice of using signs with ELLs isn't more widely discussed, advertised, or researched, Daniels says, "Nobody stands to make a lot of money off of it."

This appears to be one of sign language's best selling points with educators. "It costs nothing," says Meister. "I use the public library; I use Web sites. And time? As much time as it takes to prepare a lesson. When I teach the signs to the students, I don't practice them enough that I'm an expert; I learn them pretty much with the students. When I teach them to the students, I have the cheat sheet right in front of me."

Still, a little extra time can feel like a lot to a busy teacher. Gong says, "Most people are not willing to invest their own time as a professional to learn signs or learn another form of teaching. It does take extra time on the teacher's part to establish a new way of doing things. Most people think I'm kind of sappy and I spoil my students."

They may or may not be spoiled, but one thing is certain: Gong's students love signing. Gong tells the story about the day she explained predator and prey relationships to her ESL life sciences class. She taught them about the ideas of "food chains" and "food webs." In the course of the class discussion, one of Gong's shyest students jumped up in his chair, and pantomimed how a plant grows, a rabbit eats the plant, and the rabbit gets attacked by a big animal. "It was so awesome to watch him get so excited," says Gong.

The fact that sign language can generate this kind of excitement is exactly what makes it such a good teaching tool, says Penn State's Daniels. "If something is fun, if it's enjoyable, you're going to be more apt to do it," she says. "And it's so much fun; children really like it. It isn't work for them. It's like play."

It's not just the students who are having a blast. Gong and Meister both love sign language, too. Says Meister: "If you watch people who sign, there's a rhythm to it; it's musical; it's really a cool thing." And Gong echoes her: "It's just so cool that there's a whole language with hands."

Cool enough to make you jump up on your seat or finally speak aloud in the language of your new country.

If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.