Even though communication in a ‘deaf’ classroom is mostly monolingual (Dutch only), most deaf pupils can be considered bilingual since they use Flemish Sign Language among themselves outside the classroom. Therefore it can be expected that some of the mistakes in the written productions of deaf children can be attributed to interference from Flemish Sign Language. Until now this has only been acknowledged intuitively. This study is a first attempt at verifying these ‘old’ intuitions on an empirical basis by focussing on reference tracking, i.e. the ways in which a narrator identifies a certain character as the one being discussed. The subjects were asked to watch an animated cartoon containing four main male characters and to then narrate the story in written Dutch or in Flemish Sign Language. A contrastive analysis of reference tracking in the narratives indeed reveals that the subjects often seem to (want to) use Flemish Sign Language structure when writing in Dutch. In doing so however, they disregard the spatial grammatical mechanisms and only focus on the lexical signs. Consequently their Dutch compositions seem to be a transliteration of some kind of degrammaticalized Flemish Sign Language.