The case for ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Associate Professor Su Kyong Isakson (Community College of Baltimore County, USA) about her 2018 paper, The Case for Heritage ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers. The conversation focuses on heritage signers, differentiated instruction, and sign language interpreter education.

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Transcript:

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Associate Professor Su Kyong Isakson. Su Kyong teaches Interpreter Education at the Community College of Baltimore County in Maryland, in the U.S. She is also a co-founder of The Coda Network and a professional interpreter. Her work includes mentoring, coaching, and focusing on the teaching methods of heritage signers.

Today we are going to talk in general about interpreter education, and in particular about a 2018 paper that Su Kyong wrote entitled The Case for Heritage ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers. Just a note for the audience, ASL stands for American Sign Language.

Su Kyong, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Su Kyong: Thank you for having me here. I’m excited to talk about this body of work.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And just to start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became an interpreter educator?

Su Kyong: Sure, funny story, I went to grad school because I was mad. So, nothing like having a passion to get you to do something.

(Emily and Su Kyong laugh)

And so, really what had happened was our national certifying body and professional organization had taken a vote on whether deaf interpreted parents or deaf-parented interpreters should have a dedicated seat on the board, the governing board of this national body, and the membership voted on it, and in fact, they voted on it twice.

They voted it down. (laughs)

Emily: Wow…

Su Kyong: And so, it was at a time in my life when I was taking some professional development courses around interpreting and like, you know, getting better in my own practice. And for the first time had a cohort of other Codas, you know, children of deaf adults, who were also interpreters, that I was doing this work with and like really digging into the interpreting work with, and to then have this motion like fail by the majority of people who are in our organization just really spoke to me about the fact that people do not appreciate and under appreciate what we bring to the field.

So, I got mad, and I went back to grad school (laughs) and decided that I was going to change the field, from within the classroom, one student at a time.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That’s an awesome origin story, you know, if you watch any Marvel or something, (Emily and Su Kyong laugh) that’s a wonderful origin story, how you became an interpreter educator.

And just to get us kind of shifted into your work and what you did your grad studies on, could you tell our audience what it means to be a heritage language learner in general and what differentiated instruction is?

Su Kyong: Yeah, sure. So, a heritage language learner is somebody who has a heritage language, and so I think, maybe your audience may not know what heritage language stands for, but it’s basically a minority language used within the home that is different than the majority language of the place that you’re living in and so it typically doesn’t have a lot of supports to maintain that language and so a heritage language learner would be somebody who has a heritage language, but then later decides to learn that language in a formal setting.

So, I myself, my heritage language is Korean sign language and Korean. And so, me going to a community Korean language class is me becoming a heritage language learner of Korean. So that’s what a heritage language learner is. And then differentiated instruction is a teaching approach that basically meets students where they are. So, part of that requires you to be able to assess students and their current level of performance and then tailor your instruction to that student so that you can then take them to the next level. That’s basically differentiated instruction.

Emily: Yeah, well said, and I think that’s good background for us to officially switch to talking about your paper, your 2018 paper entitled, The Case for Heritage ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers. And in this paper, you present a solution to the shortage of culturally and linguistically competent interpreters, which is the education of heritage signers as heritage language learners. So, why is there a shortage of interpreters and what were some of the difficulties American Heritage signers reported when they began learning American Sign Language?

Su Kyong: Yeah, so something to keep in mind that’s really interesting about the context of sign language interpreters in the United States, and I’ll only speak to the United States, I don’t know about other markets but something that’s really unique to this context is that most of the interpreters who are working in this field are second language learners. And so, they’re coming to this language and this culture by way of maybe a college class or maybe they had a friend who is deaf, or a family member, like a distant family member who is deaf or something, you know, and like they’re learning this language like, you know, as an after fact, right?

Like not like somebody like you and I who grew up with this language. And this is not the case for most people who go into like interpreter translation work. In fact, they are native users of the language. You know, when you hire a Chinese English interpreter, they are native users of Chinese, and they perhaps have learned English as a second language, right? But our field is predominantly filled with second language users of American Sign Language, most of them are native English users as well, okay. But folks like you and I, who grew up with deaf parents, we are native users of American Sign Language or whatever sign language you used in our home and native users of English.

Basically, this paper is saying, well, the solution is right in front of us. Why aren’t we utilizing and training up the folks that we already know hold proficiency in these languages? You know, there’s a whole host of, there’s this whole market that’s been geared towards the development of second language learners in American Sign Language. And almost nothing has been focused on developing native language users of sign language. And so, you know, this all started when we had the Rehab Act, you know, back in the 70s and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act like it, it opened the floodgates basically for requiring interpreters, which is all great! And at the same time, the market had to react very quickly, right? Putting interpreters out into the field. When you look at the history of interpreter education, it went from like an eight-week signing class to now a six-year program. You can get a PhD in it, right? It’s changed a lot since the 60s you know, and it’s come a really long way! But that demand for interpreters really has continued to outpace the supply that the market has been able to give of qualified interpreters in ASL and English.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if you could touch upon briefly in your study, what were the difficulties that a heritage signer had when they did want to pursue formalized ASL classes? Like what were the experiences there?

Su Kyong: Yeah, sure. So, most heritage signers would report that the classes that they were taking, first of all, they were met with teachers that had language attitudes about their signing ability. They were met with classmates that also had language attitudes about what they expected the heritage signer to be able to do, and that was sometimes in stark contrast with what they really could do. Because what we do know about heritage signers is that variability in their their production and their receptive variability of language is like goes, it swings the gamut, right? Like you could be super passive and like only understand sign language and not even be able to produce sign language, all the way up to being a super, super proficient signer, right? Who can hold very, you know, in-depth conversations, you know, and everywhere in between. And so, when heritage signers were going to take ASL classes or screening into ASL classes and then going into interpreter training programs, they were coming across people that had all sorts of expectations about what they should and should be able to do.

So, coming across language attitudes and biases around that was a big, big thing. But then because I had already mentioned before that a lot of this field had largely focused its effort on quickly training up interpreters, which meant that they were focusing on the development of L2 language users. And so, everything was too basic for Codas. They were coming into the classroom, they’re like, I already know how to do all this stuff. However, there wasn’t anything that was targeted towards the things that they needed, which, you know, and there are some things that they need, right?

And you can describe heritage signers or any heritage language user as something like Swiss cheese. (Su Kyong and Emily laugh) Swiss cheese is very delicious, ages well, but there’s lots of holes in it. And you don’t know where the holes are, right? And so, part of it is trying to figure out where the gaps are and how you can fill that in. And it could be anything from like grammatical structures to limited vocabulary to like, you know, being able to use some of the more sophisticated parts of language like personification and depiction and things like that.

So yeah, Codas were struggling with a whole range of things when it came to the classroom. And they basically felt like none of this was designed for me. Like nobody sees me. And they don’t get what I need. (laughs)

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I agree with everything you’re saying, and I really love that Swiss cheese visual or example, that’s a great way to put it. So, thank you for that explanation, yeah.

So, to talk a bit more about the methodology that you used in this paper and in your master’s, your paper presents data from The Heritage Signers: Language Profile Questionnaire, can you explain how you developed this heritage language tool to be relevant in this context in the heritage designer context?

Su Kyong: Yeah, sure. So, this is an adaptation of an existing tool that was used by Maria Carreira from CSULB, California State University of Long Beach, and she uses this in her heritage Spanish program. And so I took that tool, and I basically translated it for our audience, thinking carefully about, well, what is relevant within the context of heritage signers, trying to be really as broad and encompassing as I can, knowing that there are folks out there that experience you know parents who speak only and sign a little bit or speak and sign simultaneously or are deafblind and use a tactile mode of you know sign language. And so, trying to be really encompassing of that whole breadth really of variety that we have in our community. And it was literally going through line by line and thinking about each question with that level of depth.

And… In addition to that, I had worked with Dr. Joseph Hill, who’s a sociolinguist who graduated from Gallaudet University and currently focuses a lot on Black ASL. But we had worked together to develop these language attitude questions and the scale to try to determine, to try to determine like the heritage signer’s own feelings about their language or like even being corrected around their language and what language attitudes they may hold themselves, which was an interesting endeavor. And let’s see, and then I had also done one-on-one interviews with those who were willing to follow up after filling out my survey. You know, I had done a pilot and got about a hundred and, don’t quote me, about 160 people who filled it out and followed up with some one-on-one interviews and really had asked questions about like, you know, tell me your most salient memory around language and just really trying to get to the heart of some of these stories about what it means to be a heritage signer and having like these early recollections of, of difference, language difference in our lives, yeah.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and you report two really interesting, to me, distinctions between heritage speakers and heritage signers. So that being the generational status and schooling in the heritage language. Could you give us some examples of distinctions in those two areas that I just mentioned?

Su Kyong: Yeah, so this is a very interesting thing to look at because when we look at generational status. So, the original work about heritage languages in the United States was focused on the community of Spanish speakers. And so, when we talk about the community of Spanish speakers, we talk about, well, a couple of things. One, those who are native and indigenous to the land, right? Because as we know, the borders of America have not always been the borders as we know that they are now. So, there are indigenous speakers of Spanish in the United States, but then there are also those that have migrated here from other countries.

And so, when we look at generational status, what we’re really talking about and often what happens with, what we say is that those that are closer to the motherland, so to speak, you know, like the first-generation person is going to have like the most proficiency and they’re native. But this isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to the deaf community, right? First of all, there’s no country that deaf people come from where there’s a majority of sign language users, right? (laughs) And oftentimes what we see is that deaf folks are isolated in their experience. They are one deaf person among many hearing family members and so, it is very questionable at what age that person receives exposure to language.

What we do know is that children who are born of those deaf parents and who grew up in a signing environment, those children definitely have native exposure, in the same way that like, you know, somebody from Mexico would have native exposure to Spanish, right. Like it was a part of their environment, and they were enriched with that language in their home. But then there’s also this piece about being heritage, right? It was only within the home, and it’s not supported anywhere else, which is where the schooling part comes in.

So, from the ages of zero to five, they’re at home, they’re with their family, they’re signing all the time, if it’s a signing family, that’s great. And then the child enrolls into kindergarten where they now for however many hours a day, seven, eight hours a day, are being exposed to English, much more than they would have from the ages of zero to five. Exposure to English could have been very like incidental, going to the grocery store, you know, seeing extended family members for short periods of times you know instead of those eight hours of academic instruction in English.

And so, this is where a lot of the research on heritage signers really starts to notice a difference in the ability to maintain the heritage language for these kids, right? And so, their signing starts to suffer and their English skills start to go on the upswing. And so, yeah, two very, very big differences um, in that way.

Now when it comes to heritage speakers, let’s say a Spanish speaking child were to go to an immersion school where they also speak Spanish, they would be able to better maintain their language and would be able to learn academic subjects in that language. However, this isn’t something that is widely available, although it is more widely available in that context, in the Spanish speaking context, than it is for signers.

Deaf children because of the, you know, because of IDEA and the federal government’s responsibility to provide equal access to education, gives deaf children the opportunity to go to like schools for the deaf or like programs where they use American Sign Language primarily. But Codas don’t have access to those programs.

And so, schooling in American Sign Language is not even really an option. There really isn’t. I mean, I think I can think of maybe on one hand, across the United States, and not all at the same time, where there have been programs in American Sign language that are open to Codas. And there’s maybe two that I know of right now that are still running. One is PS47 in New York, and then there’s an immersion program in New Mexico. But all the other programs have come and gone, right? So, there is no like long standing practice of incorporating Codas with deaf children in the classroom to be able to maintain their heritage language.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. So essentially the first time that they are going into heritage language schooling is in, when they go to university or college, and or maybe go to an associate’s degree program if they want to pursue like a career, but there’s no like recreational or community language schools it seems right just to-

Su Kyong: Well, yeah, so community language classes, you know, it’s not like going to a Saturday school to learn Ukrainian. (laughs)

Emily: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because it’s Saturday school. Exactly. Yeah, that’s the word I was looking for.

Su Kyong: You know, like we don’t really have those. Yeah, we don’t have those really. But we do have like elective classes in American Sign Language, like in middle school and high school and in colleges. But that also affords a certain set of privileges, right? And so does going to a Saturday school. But yeah, and these Saturday schools, yeah, in American Sign Language, like really don’t don’t exist anywhere that I know of.

Emily: Yeah, so as you’ve mentioned before, I myself am a heritage signer and sign language interpreter as well. So, I believe the implications of your work in this paper is very important. So how can the future education of heritage signers be modified? And how can deaf parents establish specific opportunities for heritage language development for their hearing children?

Su Kyong: Yeah, so one of the things that is, that’s really tricky is well, here’s what we know, is that… When heritage language users have a strong connection with the community, they have a stronger identity with that community, right? So, let’s take Codas, for example, you have a strong connection with the Deaf community, Deaf signing community. You identify strongly as a Coda and that in turn will speak to your proficiency in the language. Like they tend to have better proficiency in the language.

Okay, so if families really are looking to maintain a child’s use of sign language and really encourage that, then maintaining that connection with the community is a key, as a key piece there. But also having peers.

Peers for language is really, really important. And the thing that’s super tricky about Codas and their peers is that it’s so much easier for them to speak to one another because their vocabulary in English is much larger than their signed vocabulary often. And because, like I had mentioned also, their sign proficiency is highly variable and so once they run into a roadblock, they switch immediately to English to ease that, you know, to ease the communication because really, you know, I just want to borrow your Barbie doll and let’s play, right? (Su Kyong and Emily laugh) Like, that’s really what it’s all about. So, trying to find peers that will maintain that language can be quite tricky.

If I were to take a page out of my own book, my own story. Growing up, so in the home, my mom used Korean Sign Language, and she didn’t learn American Sign Language, we both didn’t learn American Sign Language until I was probably about six or seven years old when she enrolled at the Ohlone School for the, Ohlone College rather in California. So that’s when she started learning ASL. That’s when we started using ASL in the home. But not too long after that, probably two or three years after that, we started going to Korea quite regularly over the summers. And during that time, I would spend anywhere from one to two months at a summer religious camp with my family where there were tons of Coda kids and deaf kids. And the only common language we had was Korean Sign Language.

Now, this is a very unique situation. I don’t know how anybody would be able to recreate this but, but it’s so strongly imprinted in my mind, this experience. And I had this summer experience probably two or three times during, which most people consider a pretty tenuous time in maintaining your heritage language, which is around like preteen. Like, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, you know, this is where like the kids really are like, no, I’m using the majority language! You know, they don’t want to use the the home language at all, right? But I had that reinforcement in these summer camps and then because I grew up in a culturally Korean home and have identified as Korean and later when my daughter was born, my partner and I were talking about how are we going to maintain these heritage languages that, you know, which ones are we going to maintain? And I was like, well, to me it’s a no-brainer that we’re going to pass on Korean Sign Language.

But then the question became how because I’m not proficient enough at this point because it’s been years since I had those summer experiences. And of course, those were about borrowing Barbie dolls, right? Not raising children. (Su Kyong and Emily laugh) And, you know, so the context is quite a bit different. And so, I hired a nanny who was deaf and from Korea, to basically be the language model that I wanted my child to have, right. And so, yeah, these intentional choices that we can make and same thing with like doing a Saturday class or like, you know, intentionally choosing a peer group that will reinforce that language use, intentionally being plugged into the Deaf community so that your child is exposed to and engages with many different types of signers is all going to help maintain that heritage language. Yeah, so that’s what families can be doing.

Now, in terms of education, it depends on if we’re talking K through 12. I don’t know that we have very much control over that. But if we’re talking college, it’s a different story. One of the things that folks can be doing is really taking a critical assessment of sign language use by heritage signers. And what I mean by that is not just being like, oh, you’re better than all your peers in ASL 5, we’re just going to pass you on. Because really that doesn’t help them. It doesn’t help them get any better, right? And every time they sign something a little funky or not quite the right way, you know, coming down on them hard. It doesn’t really help because again, like they wanted to be in school. They wanted to learn the language. And now you’re telling me that I’m better than all my peers. But then when I make a mistake, you’re coming down me like I should have known better. Like there’s a lot of conflicting information that’s going on here, right?

So really taking a careful assessment of a heritage signer’s skills and thinking critically about how you can be providing these supports while they are in, of course, with your other class, your other classes, because it’s always where you have one heritage signer and like the rest of them L2ers you know, (laughs) thinking about how you can be providing additional supports. And this is differentiated instruction. This is really just differentiated instruction.

It’s going to be, you know, the hearing students in the class are always going to be like, oh, but the Coda knows so much more, and you know they’re going to want to pair with them and want to learn from them. But that doesn’t necessarily benefit the Coda at all. In fact, all it does is benefit the L2ers. And all the research tells us that, that having mixed classrooms like this really just benefits the L2ers. (laughs)

Emily: Again!

Su Kyong: Again, right?! (Su Kyong and Emily laugh)

But what are we doing to enrich the experience of Codas? Right, how can we be bringing in deaf people, other deaf maybe even signing peers to be partnered with them or in the classroom, right? Our program right now is launching a deaf interpreter training program. And so, we have deaf interpreters in with hearing interpreters and of course Coda interpreters, right? And so, what an enriched classroom to be able to have this mix of students, but then also Codas are not alone any longer, they have deaf students too. And that’s a completely different experience, but it still enriches one another in a way that is very different than when a Coda is paired with an L2er, you know.

Emily: Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your family story as well, just to acknowledge that it’s a beautiful story and everything you said about the educational changes or things that could be considered, I think is very important to think about. So, thank you for that.

And to start to wrap up our conversation today, what is next for you and your work? Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience today while you’re on the podcast?

Su Kyong: Oh, boy. What is next? I’m always… I’ve always got my fingers in lots of different projects. (laughs) I am on a team that supports a federal grant working with atypical language users and training interpreters to work with atypical language users. And this is actually a really interesting project that is going to be wrapping up within the next year because the grant runs out. But I actually do look forward to where that’s, where that’s going to take me, and I’d love to see that work continue.

And for the audience, you know, this atypical language users are like folks who um who probably have, let’s say, kind of like my mom, right? Like she didn’t learn a formal sign language until she was like 10 or 11 years old. And prior to that she relied on home made signs. And all the way to folks who like have rheumatoid arthritis and probably have like different signing ability because their hand mobility is, you know, limited.  And so, continuing to train interpreters to work with this population, I think is really important and uplifting multicultural and multilingual Codas and signers and deaf folks to really claim to really like space and their knowledge and what they have to contribute to the field of interpreting I think is something that I would love to continue to do. I’ve already been doing some of that work. But the more I see us stepping into ourselves and really claiming what we bring and sharing it with our field, the more I can see the dialogue around the work of interpreters shift. And I think it really needs to do a hard pivot. (Su Kyong and Emily laugh) We’re behind. We’re behind! So, we need to do a hard pivot. And so, I’m happy to see that move. And so, I hope to continue down that path.

Emily: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Yeah, thanks, thank you again, Su Kyong, for your time today. This has been a wonderful conversation. So, thank you!

Su Kyong: Absolutely.

Emily: Yeah, and thanks for joining, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time!