The Lamar University College of Fine Arts and Communication recently announced approval of the first baccalaureate degree program in American Sign Language (ASL) in Texas. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approved the new program that will be offered this fall.
The Department of Communication Disorders and Deaf Education has been working on securing this degree program for the past four years to address a critical shortage of well trained deaf education teachers and ASL interpreters throughout the nation. According to the American Sign Language Teachers Association, ASL is one of the most widely used languages in the United States. Census data collected in 2004 indicates the deaf population in the U.S. to be approximately 10 percent.
“Attaining approval for this program is a real coup for the university,” said Russ Schultz, dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication. “When you consider Lamar has one of the finest deaf education programs in the country, it is appropriate that we lead in establishing a program that will provide teachers and translators for the deaf community, not only in our region, but also the state and the country.”
Students entering the program who aspire to be teachers or interpreters will learn the advanced subtleties of communicating correctly and will develop a complete competency in ASL. Prospective teachers will also participate in the traditional teacher education program and will be prepared to take the required state mandated licensure examination for teacher certification.
“Although ASL is fairly easy to learn, it is a true language of its own and as such has vast complexities and subtle nuances much like any foreign language,” said Tony Martin, department chair for Communication Disorders and Deaf Education. “You can become conversant in conversational ASL rather quickly, but to really be able to function within the deaf community requires more sophistication and mastery of the language. To be fully competent to teach ASL requires a great deal of training.”
The deaf education program has been serving deaf individuals on and off campus in the southeast Texas region since the early 1970s. Deaf education students are placed in schools and classrooms to work with deaf education teachers. The deaf education program initially offered only the bachelor’s degree, but has grown to include the master’s and doctoral degrees. Texas is one of many states that recognize ASL as a foreign language and many high schools offer ASL as a foreign language option. Martin expects the new ASL program to grow rapidly during the next few semesters.
the article can be viewed at: http://www.lamar.edu/admin/content/4193_4536.htm
http://www.lamar.edu
http://dept.lamar.edu/cofac/cmds/
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