ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the most salient issues in sign bilingual education with special attention to implementing a bilingual-bimodal approach in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The field of deaf education is characterized by uniqueness and controversies. Contrary to popular belief, deaf bilingual education is not merely a copy of bilingual teaching methods used with hearing students since sign bilingual education is also bimodal: it entails the use of two languages in two different modalities: the sign language of the local Deaf community together with (usually the written version of) the spoken language of a hearing community. In order to help the reader appreciate the complexity of teaching and learning a foreign language in such contexts, this chapter first gives a brief overview of general issues in Deaf education, and this is followed by a detailed discussion of deaf bilingual education: its principles, methodological issues, the transfer of skills between languages, and questions to be answered by future research. The last part of the chapter looks into the application of a sign bilingual approach in teaching foreign languages, the problems encountered when a sign language interpreter is used, and the question of incorporating the foreign sign language in the teaching-learning process.
