The Educational Linguistics of Bilingual Deaf Education

Abstract

Deaf students today are educated largely in monolingual educational contexts despite the fact that the Deaf community defines itself as bilingual and bicultural. In this chapter, we summarize some of the unique issues and historical contexts that characterize deaf education in the United States. We then describe how current research in three sub-fields of cognitive linguistics can lead to new possibilities for creating socially responsible learning environments for deaf students in bilingual settings.