abstract: A researcher reflects using a close reading of interview transcripts and description to share what happened while participating in multiple roles in a larger ethnographic study of the acculturation process of deaf students in kindergarten classrooms in three countries. The course of this paper will focus on three instances that took place in Japan and America. The analysis of these examples will bring to light the concept of taking on multiple roles, including graduate research assistant, interpreter, cultural mediator, and sociolinguistic consultant within a research project serving to uncover challenging personal and professional dilemmas and crossing boundaries; the dual roles, interpreter and researcher being the primary focus. This analysis results in a brief look at a thought provoking, yet evolving task of the researcher/interpreter. Maintaining multiple roles in the study the researcher is able to potentially identify and contribute "hidden" knowledge that may have been overlooked by other members of the research team. Balancing these different roles become key implications when interpreting practice, ethical boundaries, and participant research at times the lines of separation are blurred. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2011

This thesis by article investigates the question “What discourses are (re)produced by policy documents and administrators relating to ESL programmes for Deaf newcomers to Canada?” The surrounding monograph begins with a description of the research context and a review of the relevant literature and ends with concluding remarks. The article contains a condensed version of the context and literature review, the methodology, discussion, conclusions, and relevance to the field of education. The research uses discourse analysis to examine federal, provincial, and schoolboard documents, and participant interviews. There were two participants, one Deaf and one hearing, who both administer ESL programmes for Deaf newcomers. The findings suggest that both the policy documents and the participants exist in tensions between the majority Discourse and the Deaf community Discourse. This area of research is pertinent to second language education for Deaf newcomers, a growing population in the wake of mass-migrations.

Research into parsing sign language corpora is ongoing. Corpora for German Sign Language and Italian Sign Language have been parsed (Bungeroth et al., 2006; Mazzei, 2011, 2012, respectively). However, research into parsing a corpus of American Sign Language is non-existent. Examples of parsed ASL sentences in literature are typically isolated examples used to show a particular type of construction. Apparently no attempt has been made to parse an entire corpus of American Sign Language utterances. This thesis presents a method for constructing a grammar so that a parser implementing Combinatory Categorial Grammar can parse a corpus of American Sign Language. The results are evaluated and presented.

The focus of this study was to examine the Deaf community and their preferences for both a psychologist and the language utilized in a clinical psychological setting. The study gave each participant a mock profile for a psychologist and then asked participants to answer questions on their perceptions of the psychologist provided. A total of 22 participants who identified as Deaf, deaf, hard-of-hearing, or as an individual with hearing loss were surveyed. Results indicated that participants randomly assigned to the Deaf psychologist had higher rates of satisfaction and trust over participants who were assigned to other psychologists. The study also supported the concept that individuals who prefer using American Sign Language will similarly prefer a psychologist who knows and can communicate in American Sign Language.

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This thesis presents design and development of a gesture recognition system to recognize finger spelling American Sign Language hand gestures. We developed this solution using the latest deep learning technique called convolutional neural networks. This system uses blink detection to initiate the recognition process, Convex Hull-based hand segmentation with adaptive skin color filtering to segment hand region, and a convolutional neural network to perform gesture recognition. An ensemble of four convolutional neural networks are trained with a dataset of 25254 images for gesture recognition and a feedback unit called head pose estimation is implemented to validate the correctness of predicted gestures. This entire system was developed using Python programming language and other supporting libraries like OpenCV, Tensor flow and Dlib to perform various image processing and machine learning tasks. This entire application can be deployed as a web application using Flask to make it operating system independent.

Many Deaf people today consider themselves a linguistic minority with a culture distinct from the mainstream hearing society. This is in large part because they communicate through an independent language——American Sign Language (ASL). However, two hundreds years ago, sign language was a “common language” for communication between hearing and deaf people within the institutional framework of “manualism.” Manualism is a pedagogical system of sign language introduced mainly from France in order to buttress the campaign for deaf education in the early-19th-century America. In 1817, a hearing man Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851) and a deaf Frenchman Laurent Clerc (1785-1869) co-founded the first residential school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. These early manualists shaped sign language within the evangelical framework of “moral government.” They believed that the divine origin of signs would lead the spiritual redemption of people who could not hear. Inside manual institutions, the religiously defined practice of signing, which claimed to transform the “heathen deaf” into being the “signing Christian,” enabled the process of assimilation into a shared “signing community.” The rapid expansion of manual institutions hence fostered a strong and separate deaf culture that continues to influence today’s deaf communities in the United States. However, social reformers in the mid-nineteenth century who advocated “oralism” perceived manualism as a threat to social integration. “Oralists” pursued a different model of deaf education in the 1860s, campaigning against sign language and hoping to replace it entirely with the skills in lip-reading and speech. The exploration of this tension leads to important questions: Were people who could not hear “(dis)abled” in the religious context of the early United States? In what ways did the manual institutions train students to become “able-bodied” citizens? How did this religiously framed pedagogy come to terms with the “hearing line” in the mid 19th century? In answering these questions, this dissertation analyzes the early history of manual education in relation to the formation and diffusion of religious governmentality, a topic that continues to influence deaf culture to this day. / published_or_final_version / Modern Languages and Cultures / Master / Master of Philosophy

While Deaf students are not typically classified as English as a second language (ESL) students, the majority of deaf students first become fluent in a signed language, making them ideal candidates for ESL research. This case study has been designed to explore the ways in which one method of ESL reading instruction, known as modified guided reading (MGR), affects the language acquisition process, and resulting reading comprehension level, of a deaf student over eleven weeks. The study documented the student’s language acquisition development both in American Sign Language (ASL) and in English, as well as tracked the student’s growth in reading comprehension, metalinguistic awareness, and visual attention skills. The Accelerated Reader (AR) program, benchmark testing, and daily observations were used to measure growth. Findings of the study suggest that the ESL methods implemented through MGR positively impacted the student’s language acquisition process, reading comprehension level, metalinguistic awareness, and visual attention skills. Results showed an increase in all three of the student’s AR scores as follows: 31% in reading level, 13.1% in number of words read, and 13.2 % in comprehension test scores. Observations and benchmark testing revealed increased metalinguistic knowledge in word, syntactic, and pragmatic awareness. Visual attention skills were found to be the key element in allowing reading comprehension to take place and strategies for improving these skills were found to be a necessary part of the MGR process.