Perceptions of Korean–Korean Sign Language Grammar among Students Majoring in Korean Sign Language Education and Implications for Korean Grammar Education

This study examines how graduate students majoring in Korean Sign Language (KSL) Education perceive the grammatical systems of Korean and Korean Sign Language from the perspective of Korean grammar education, and explores the implications for grammar instruction. A qualitative analysis was conducted on 41 final course reports using manual coding to identify major categories and tendencies. The results show that 85.4% of the reports reflected awareness of morpho-syntactic features such as word order, particles, morphological changes, and signunits, indicating a tendency to describe KSL structure by referencing Korean grammar. In addition, 65.9% of the reports focused on visual-linguistic character istics including simultaneity, spatiality, iconicity, and non-linearity, recognizing KSL as a natural language with a grammatical system distinct from Korean. Furthermore, 53.7% of the reports proposed educational and practical applications, such as interpreting strategies and instructional approaches grounded in actual field experience. Analysis of perceptual trends revealed complementary trajectories, with hearing students moving from theory to practice and Deaf students from experiential intuition to conceptual understanding. These findings suggest that Korean grammatical knowledge functions as a reference frame for analyzing KSL and can be extended to bilingual and multimodal approaches to grammar education that incorporates visual and spatial linguistic features.