New Directions in ASL-English Bilingual Ebooks

Abstract

The widespread adoption of smartphones and tablet computers have enabled the rapid creation and distribution of innovative American Sign Language (ASL) and written English bilingual ebooks, aimed primarily at deaf and hard-of-hearing children. These sign-print bilingual ebooks are unique in how they take advantage of digital platforms to display both video and text, and they take markedly divergent approaches to integrating the two media. How they are designed belies potentially unequal representations of each language, which may be partially a consequence of the composition of ebook production teams and their access to programming skills. In addition, the selection of interactive features in these ebooks suggest that deaf children's acquisition of English literacy skills continues to be a greater priority than that of ASL literacy skills. Given their prioritization of English literacy, these ASL-English ebooks raise intriguing questions about whether and how they support bilingual development in deaf children, the role of ASL as a language of education and literature, and how revolutions in ebook design are challenging traditional approaches to reading.

Acknowledgments

The author extends appreciation especially to Cynthia Neese Bailes and also M. Diane Clark, Jordan Fenlon, Peter Hauser, Michele Knobel, Brenda Nicodemus, Stacy Nowak, Joseph Santini, Liz Stone Nirenberg, and three anonymous reviewers for their support and helpful comments on this article.

Notes

^1. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the captioning feature and for suggesting the potential learning opportunities provided by this translation activity.

^2. The ebooks creators (Mueller & Hurtig, 2009) made this choice of Signed English in order to achieve an exact one-to-one correspondence for every single word displayed, regardless of its saliency; ASL does not have equivalent signs for many high-frequency English words such as “is” or “the.” Other reading software and ebooks (e.g., The Thinking Reader, The Baobab) provided equivalences at the word level as well, but only for more salient words like “elephant,” which is more readily achievable using ASL.