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From:
Hope Hurlbut Date: Tue Dec 14, 1999 10:34 pm Subject: Re: Literacy in SW | |
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Thank you for all your helpful e-mails and attachments. I really appreciate them. At the moment I am going through the ASL word list that I got from a Sabahan Deaf who graduated from Gallaudet a couple of years ago. I found that a lot of my transcriptions were "wrong" when compared with your SW dictionary, not necessarily because I did not transcribe them correctly (though there were quite a few in that category), but because she has Malaysianized her ASL a bit. Having come back a couple of years ago she found that the Malaysian Deaf could no longer understand her properly, so she made a great effort to switch back to Malaysian Sign Language (MSL or BIM as the Deaf call it - Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia, literally meaning Language Sign Malaysia). I am very grateful for the SW dictionary, (though I think I have found a few typos). The purpose for this e-mail is to comment on Stephan's e-mail about how readily his students learned and benefitted from SW. As you know I work for the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and it has long been our policy to use the "mother tongue" (for spoken languages) to teach people how to read and write. Quite a number of scientific studies have been done by people outside of SIL proving that children in school learn to read faster and better if they learn in their mother tongue first. They realize then that reading has meaning. If they are learning in a second language they have two hurdles to jump, learn the second language and then learn to write in the second language. It takes longer and is much more difficult. Some give up in the attempt, because they never learn that those black marks on the paper are supposed to have meaning. It is doubly so for a Deaf child who has never heard a spoken language. I have heard it compared to us going to school, and having to learn that the numbers 625 mean "cat" and 318 mean "dog". Can you imagine what a heavy memory load that is when a person has no help from the appearance of a word that there is any reason for the series of letters? Every single word has to be memorized in isolation. Kudos to all the Deaf who have managed to master English with its abominable spelling system that baffles hearing people let alone the Deaf. Languages that are spelled phonetically at least have fewer letters to memorize! Thanks again. Hope Hurlbut | |
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---------------------------- Forwarded with Changes --------------------------- From: Hope Hurlbut at MLB Date: 12/14/99 5:28PM To: SignWriting List at INTERNET Subject: Re: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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