Substantial changes in deaf education have taken place in recent years, but there is still an emphasis on the learning of English, written rather than spoken. As a result, many institutions promote the learning of what is known as Signed English (also called Manually Coded English or MCE). This is essentially a means of producing signs that correspond to the words in an English sentence, in English word order. In many ways, Signed English is designed to facilitate interaction between the deaf and the hearing community. Its greatest advantage is that it seems to present a much less formidable learning task for the hearing parent of a deaf child and provides the parent with a communication system to use with the child.

For similar reasons, hearing teachers in deaf education can make use of Signed English when they sign at the same time as they speak. It is also easier for those hearing interpreters who produce a simultaneous translation of public speeches or lectures for deaf audiences. Many deaf people actually prefer interpreters to use Signed English because they say there is a higher likelihood of understanding the message. Apparently, when some interpreters try to use ASL, the message seems to suffer, for the simple reason that, unless they learned ASL in childhood, few hearing people are proficient at it.

However, Signed English is neither English nor ASL. When used to produce an exact version of a spoken English sentence, Signed English takes twice as long as the Gestures and sign languages 201 production of that same sentence in either English or ASL. Consequently, in practice, exact versions are rarely produced and a hybrid format emerges, using some wordsigns and incomplete English word order. (In many cases, even the word-signs are changed to be more English-like, with a G letter-shape, for example, being used to represent the English word glad, rather than the actual ASL sign for this concept.) It’s sort of like producing messages with German word order, but containing French nouns, adjectives and verbs. The product is neither French nor German, but (one might argue) it is one way of getting French speakers to learn how German sentences are constructed.

The type of argument just presented is what has been used in support of teaching Signed English in deaf schools because one of the major aims is to prepare students to be able to read and write English. Underlying that aim is the principle that deaf education should be geared towards enabling the deaf, for obvious economic reasons, to take part in the hearing world. The net effect is to make ASL a kind of underground language, used only in deaf–deaf interaction. As such, this natural sign language of the deaf continues to be poorly understood and subject to many of the myths that have existed throughout its history.