Page 247 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

232 Reading Between the Signs

CSUN—California State University, Northridge. CSUN has a rela-
tively large number of deaf students and a National Cen-
ter on Deafness.
Fingerspelling—The use of handshapes to represent letters of the
alphabet. In ASL it is primarily used for proper names and
specific terms that do not have a sign equivalent.
Gallaudet University—The only liberal arts college for deaf stu-
dents in the world, located in Washington, DC. It came
into public awareness in 1988 during the “Deaf President
Now” movement.
Mainstreaming—A national movement to educate disabled chil-
dren in the “least restrictive environment,” often in class-
rooms full of nondisabled children. For the single deaf child
in a hearing classroom, mainstreaming may result in the
isolation of having no one to communicate with except
the interpreter.
NAD—National Association of the Deaf.
Name Signs—Name signs are used to refer to someone who is
not physically present. They are culturally significant be-
cause of people’s strong feelings about their name signs,
which often demonstrate family or community ties. In the
Traditional Name Sign System of ASL a handshape repre-
senting an initial of the person’s name is made in a spe-
cific location with a certain movement. See chapter 5,
pages 104–107, for a more detailed description.
NTD—National Theater of the Deaf.
NTID—National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of the
Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. NTID pro-
vides deaf students with postsecondary education in tech-
nical fields.
Oralism—The belief that deaf people are better off learning to
speak and lip-read so that they can fit into the majority
hearing world. Oralism is also a method of instruction for
deaf children that stresses lipreading and speech skills in-
stead of signing.
PSE—Pidgin Sign English. This refers to a manner of signing—not
a specific dialect, but a fluid (sometimes muddy) compro-
mise between ASL and more English-like signing systems.
Real-Time Captioning—Simultaneous, running captions. A court
reporter who has had special training and uses certain

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