Options to Study Sign Language Overseas Slowly Growing
Students who want to study American Sign Language — the fourth most commonly taught language other than
English at American colleges and universities — have limited, but growing, options to enroll in sign
language programs abroad, according to an article in Inside Higher Ed (“Studying (Sign) Languages Abroad,” May 5, 2008).
“Part of this is because the United States sort of leads the world in sign language instruction at a
university level, so you often don’t see French Sign Language or Italian Sign Language having very solid
positions in universities,” Sherman Wilcox, chair of the department of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, told the Chronicle.
But, students who wish to study overseas are slowly discovering a handful of opportunities to study other
sign languages.
Italian, Jamaican Sign Languages Among Formal Study Options Abroad
Just last year, Siena School for Liberal
Arts, a nearly decade-old school in Siena, Italy, added two three-week long summer sessions to its
single semester and year-long study programs. In one summer program, American ASL students study Italian
deaf culture and Italian Sign Language, which is significantly different than ASL. In the other, deaf
Americans and deaf Italians live together and study each others’ signed and written languages.
A Goshen College program allows ASL students to spend six weeks in Jamaica studying the
country’s deaf and hearing cultures and Jamaican Sign Language, which is similar enough to ASL that
students are immediately able to communicate, said Sheila Yoder, director of the program and assistant
professor of American Sign Language at Goshen. For the other six weeks of the program, students live and
work at one of eight different Jamaican schools for the deaf.
While formal study abroad programs created specifically for students of sign language are still few and
far between, interest in sign language has increased dramatically, a recent survey by the Modern Language Association reveals.
College-level enrollment in American Sign Language grew to 78,829 in 2006 from 11,420 in 1998 — an
increase that is parallel to interest in international education.