Abstract

Historically, it has been the practice of colleges, universities, and other institutions that have English as a Second Language programs to place deaf students who are having problems in composition classes in those programs. At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), this has been an occasional practice since 1980, near the beginning of the Intensive English Language Program (IELP). Reasoning behind this was that educators had discovered that many deaf students share similar problems with some of the foreign students learning English: no articles; lack of the verb "to be;" and few, if any, prepositions.

As the 10th and newest affiliate of the Postsecondary Education Consortium (PEC), UALR is committed to expanding and improving services for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. One area of increased focus since the inception of UALR's PEC affiliation has been the need for additional English instruction to students who are deaf and non-native English users or who have deficits in their English education backgrounds. With a task such as this one, each university must examine its own resources in order to develop programs that offer the best available options for its particular situation. At UALR, we chose to collaborate efforts between the Disability Support Services/PEC affiliate program for students who are deaf or hard of hearing and the Intensive English Language Program in order to develop an English as a Second (Foreign) Language class for American Sign Language (ASL) users -- ESL for ASL Users.

Back to 1996 PEPNet conference Proceedings