A Practical Study on Language Learning for the Deaf Children : with reference to Bilingual Education in Scandinavian Countries

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In Nordic countries, the goal for deaf children is to become actively bilingual, with sign language successfully taught as their primary language and spoken language (reading and writing especially) as their first foreign language.In this research, the historical background that lead Denmark to adopt bilingual education for the deaf was studied and "Adams Book", a textbook used to teach Danish and Danish sign language for deaf children in Denmark, was examined from general linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view, to pursuit how we should encourage deaf children to learn language in Japan.The results of this study made it clear that sign language is of an advantage for deaf children to learn languages. The crux of the matter now is not whether it is desirable to use sign language in deaf education, but how it is taught as a subject and how it is used as a language of instruction.In order to pave the road for rational and systematic education of deaf children, Japan will have to solve the following problems :1. To train teachers who teach Japanese Sign Language as a subject, explore teaching methods, and prepare textbook.2. To train teachers who teach Japanese, mathematics, science, social studies, English and other subjects in sign language and study teaching methods, and prepare textbooks.3. To study means to make sign vocabulary large and flexible enough to codify knowledge and information from various domains of life in the present world.4. To train specialists in sign language studies and develop Japanese Sign Language as a full-fledged language.5. To study bilingual education and find methods to produce persons proficient in Japanese Sign Language and Japanese Language.