Intellectual mapping of the sign language role in deaf education: forecasting future reforms

Over the five decades, debatable approaches on deaf education are tangled in
the issues of oralism and manualism. The later has valued sign language as
the significant factor in the effort of providing quality deaf education. This
research aims at mapping the intellectual reports on sign language position
in deaf education from 1972 until 2023 including 1,000 documents from
Web of Science database. This research use VOS Viewer by implementing
co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling and co-occurrence analysis to
see the development of the research, the network and the emerging topical
focus. The results suggest that sign language plays the pivotal role in deaf
education that predict the future reforms of education for the deaf in form of
bilingual education and technology integration. Other significances related
to the top discussed themes, the leading authors, the influential publishers
are also discussed to seek the interweaving connection among the sub-
emergent research foci.