Bilingual Instruction Works Even for Deaf Children of Hearing Parents Jonathan Henner, Robert J. Hoffmeister, Sarah Fish, Patrick Rosenburg, and Daniel DiDonna Center for the Study of Communication and the Deaf, Boston University Research about the benefits of bilingual education for Deaf children using American Sign Language (ASL) and English print often focuses on the fact that Deaf Children of Deaf Parents (DCDP) outperform Deaf Children of Hearing Parents (DCHP) on most academic measures (e.g. Braden, 1987). The disparity between the scores of DCHP and those of DCDP on most academic measures is an ongoing problem that proponents of bilingual education continue to address (Fish & Morford, 2012). We propose that bilingual instruction using ASL and English print is the best instructional approach for all Deaf children, and that the longer DCHP are in an ASL environment, the better their chances are to learn to read and write English fluently. The efficacy of ASL-English print bilingual education is founded on the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis (Cummins 1979; 1981; 2006), particularly in the interplay between Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). Roessingh (2006) elegantly explains that BICS deals with “the here and now” while CALP deals with “the then and there”, suggesting that CALP involves the use of abstract, cognitively complex language. It is CALP competency that undergirds the development of bilingual skills. The ability to engage in higher order conversations benefits metaphorical thinking and those who can analyze language are best able to map concepts from one language (L1) to another (L2) (Roessingh, Kover, & Wat, 2005). Roessignh (2006) points out that with accessible language modeling, competency in BICS can be acquired within 2 years of exposure. It is generally accepted that it takes about 7 years to develop CALP in any given language (Cummins, 1982). Based on these timeframes, we hypothesize that DCHP can become successful language users in general, and readers and writers of English and other spoken languages specifically, if they are placed in an ASL-English print bilingual education environment long enough and early enough to overcome the impoverished language modeling they receive outside of school. Bilingual ASL-English print instruction in Deaf Education focuses on the acquisition of a second language via print. Mounting evidence suggests that Deaf children do not need phonological access to English in order to learn English encoding and decoding skills; rather, access to ASL vocabulary and instruction in ASL phonology provides Deaf children the ability to bridge the modalities and use semantic mapping techniques (Mayberry, del Giudice, & Lieberman, 2011; McQuarrie & Parrila, 2009, 2014). Hoffmeister and Caldwell-Harris (2014) proposed a three-stage model describing how Deaf children become ASL-English print bilinguals. In the first stage, beginning Deaf readers look for orthographic patterns. Words that contain similar morphology may be mapped onto the same semantic concept. In the second stage, emerging Deaf readers map entire English sentences to concepts in their semantic inventory. The sentence mappings tend to focus on the relational connections