A Grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)

After a few decades during which oralism was the only official teaching method used at all schools for the deaf (see SOCIO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 1.1), a period of Total Communication began around the 1980s, which lasted until about 1995 (Schermer 2012). Total Communication simply meant that every means of communication was allowed, i.e., the use of speech, signs, gestures, pictures, objects, etcetera. In practice, it meant that hearing teachers learned signs and started to use SSD in their classrooms. In 1995, the Guyot school in Groningen (currently in Haren) was the first school to adopt a fully NGT + Dutch bilingual approach. However, the bilingual period did not last very long – Schermer (2012) distinguishes between the fully bilingual period between 1980 and 2004, and the monolingual/bilingual period from 2004 onwards. The transition from fully bilingual to monolingual/bilingual education was caused by several factors. Firstly, there was an increase of deaf children with a cochlear implant, roughly since the 2000s. Secondly, many parents of deaf children, sometimes supported by medical specialists, preferred (and still prefer) their child to have hearing teachers and/or to be taught in SSD, and did/do not use NGT at home themselves (Knoors 2011; Schermer 2012). Thirdly, most teachers at schools for the deaf were not sufficiently fluent in NGT, and there was a lack of suitable bilingual teaching materials. Lastly, in 2014, the Ministry of Education started to implement a strategy called Passend Onderwijs (Appropriate Education), which means that, whenever possible, children should attend mainstream education. As a consequence, schools for the deaf are closing down or are facing a different target group, e.g. children with multiple disabilities. Obviously, this has an effect on the characteristics of the schools and on their teaching methods. At the moment, there are only a few schools for the deaf which offer some form of bilingual program in the Netherlands, and most schools use SSD rather than NGT (Cokart et al. 2019).