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Signed English in the classroom, I. Teaching style and child participation

Signed English is a system of communication involving the simul taneous use of spoken and signed morphemes expressed in English grammar. It has been invented for use with pre-lingually deaf children, the aspiration behind its creation being both to facilitate communication and to help in the acquisition of English. In this paper (the first of a series of four: 'S.E.C. I-IV') we replicate and extend previous studies of classroom discourse to teachers and pupils conversing in Signed English. Analyses show that the relations between aspects of teaching 'style' and pupil participation in discourse are similar to those found in oral communication between teachers with both deaf and hearing children. The extent to which children contribute to the discourse, elaborate on their answers to questions, ask questions, address each other and show signs of misunderstanding are, as in previous work, predictable from analyses of teaching style. Measures of child loquacity also relate to the manner in which teachers control and pace discourse. Previous analyses are extended by multiple linear regression (MLR) techniques to explore in detail the relationships between measures of teaching style, characteristics of children and the emergent discourse measures. The results show that different measures of child participation relate in different ways to a common set of teacher and child factors. The implications of such findings for issues about cause and effect in language development are addressed.