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From:
Judy Kegl Date: Fri Dec 4, 1998 1:49 am Subject: Re: Silent News Columnist Seeking Some Feedback | ||||||||||||
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>>Well, I did it again! I would really like to answer the questions from >>SILENT NEWS regarding SignWriting, but I deleted the file with the >>questions. >> >>Valerie, can you resend, please? >> >>-- James >____________________________________ > >Hi James! Here they are: > >From: Alexandra Han >Subject: QUESTIONS REGARDING SIGN WRITING >To: SignWriting List > > Hi Everyone. > > Here are the questions which I promised in my last e-mail. I'm a >regular >columnist for Silent News, and those of you who are responding to a couple >of these questions or so, I'd appreciate it if you could respond by >Thursday morning, or Friday a.m. at the latest, so I could incorporate the >information into the article. > > Again, don't worry about perfect grammar, etc. I'm used to reading >Deaf >English, I read it all the time!! :-) > > Thanks!! > > Alexandra M. > These responses are by James Shepard-Kegl, not my wife Judy, although we share the same e-mail address. Judy is the linguist and writes with more compassion and patience. I tend to get a little acerbic at times, so please bear with me and forgive me a bit -- I'm really pressed for time lately and I am sending these answers without redrafting them. Thanks. >1) What role(s) do you think SignWriting is playing in Deaf and hard of >hearing children's education? Can you give specific examples? > Escuelita de Bluefields, the four year old school for Deaf students in Bluefields, Nicaragua (Atlantic coast), has been teaching and using SignWriting intensively for three years. Our situation and perspective is somewhat different than that presented in the U.S school system, or that of other industrialized nations -- or maybe not so really different afterall. Deaf education began in Nicaragua around 1977, and in earnest around 1980 or so. Prior to 1979, at most a dozen Deaf Nicaraguans were receiving some kind of exposure to education. With the 1979 revolution and the government literacy crusade of the early eighties, schools were set up for several hundred Deaf children. However, these schools were strictly oralist, and no formal sign language system existed anywhere in the country. For reasons that would energize any linguist, a sign language emerged spontaneously among the hundreds of Deaf children who were brought together. There are perhaps 600 speakers of Nicaraguan Sign Language today -- a rich language with its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc. has been documenting the emergence of this new language since 1986. This has been an essentially investigative research project. In 1994, we changed are focus in Bluefields from investigation to intervention. Nicaraguan Sign Language {ISN -- for Idioma de Senas de Nicaragua) had not spread to Nicaragua's rain forest region. However, the parents of a group of Deaf children in Bluefields, the commercial center of the area, asked us to intercede. We began conducting a language immersion program by transplanting ISN fluent adults from Managua, the capital, to Bluefields. This project over time blossomed into a full academic program. In 1996, at our request, Darlene Clarke of the Deaf Action Committee for SignWriting came to Bluefields for one month to introduce the class to SW. I also spent a week with Valerie Sutton in San Diego to learn the system. (NSLP is currently setting up a school in the center of the area of northwestern Nicaragua ravaged by Hurricane Mitch. The school in Bluefields, and the new school in Condega on the Pan American Highway, will be the only schools in Nicaragua using SW.) So, the Deaf community in Bluefields is brand new. Our students range in age from 5 to 37 -- and none of them had any prior experience in a school for Deaf and few of them had any prior experience in any kind of school at all. They all come to us as home signers only, and many are beyond critical age for language acquisition. We employ only ISN fluent Deaf faculty. We do not use hearing teachers except to assist the Deaf teachers with content, as required. We are in the business of empowering Deaf people. And, our primary objective is to give the students a first language. We do not place much emphasis on Spanish beyond very basic functional vocabulary recognition. We do place extreme emphasis on literature -- Greek classics, Moby Dick, Don Quixote, etc. We also teach in great detail history: ancient civilizations, precolumbian civilizations in the Americas, the emergence of all world religions and their particular histories, colonization, slavery, World War II, current events, and so forth. All of this is taught in sign language exclusively. We also teach ISN grammar and syntax, i.e., concepts of parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, etc.) and word order (subject-object-verb, as a general rule in ISN.) And, we teach students to read their first language -- not Spanish. Rather than force our students to struggle with reading Spanish -- an utterly foreign language and one quite inaccessible -- we want our students to ENJOY reading. Our adaptations of stories range from very simplistic to quite sophisticated. Our version of Babar the Elephant is a thorough translation of the original text. We have translated several children's stories, but also have designed our own texts on Nicaraguan history. At the present time, we have just completed a lengthy text concerning Charles Lindbergh's historic flight as a reading lesson for the upcoming January term. So, if your question concerns how SW helps children learn to read English (or Spanish), our first response is that we really don't care all that much. To us, SW teaches children to read their own language, builds self-esteem, makes new information accessible, and is fun to use. In fact, our teachers depend on it to teach stories and new material, in the exact smae way that hearing teachers need written english to read stories to hearing english speaking children. SW also enable us to teach complex grammatical concepts in sign language. Having said all this, SW obviously makes it easier for Deaf students to learn spanish vocabulary. Afterall, learning spanish is 100% rote -- there are no phonetic clues when you are deaf. (Sw in entire phonetic -- "visually phonetic".) Let's say you want to learn spanish words for different foods. It's a lot easier to have each word written in SW, SO YOU KNOW WHAT THE WORD MEANS, alongside the spanish equivalent. Otherwise, you end up with a meaningless word list, or the teacher must resort to pictures -- easy with concret words, but quite difficult with verbs, adverbs, abstract concepts, etc. When I studied French in high school, the teacher never tried to keep the meaning of the french word a secret. We were always told the english equivalent -- or given a bi-lingual dictionary to figure it out. In Bluefields, we try not to handicap our students, but extend them the same respect I enjoyed as a student of French here in the U.S. Most schools for Deaf spend some 12 years with lots of staffing and speech therapists in an effort to maximize each student's ability to communicate in the dominant hearing language. Whether that is appropriate approach or not is an ethical and education debate that we in Bluefields have been spared. We don't have the funds, the staffing or the time. Only a few of our students come to us as very young children. Most of our students enter school for the first time as teenagers or adults. > 2) Several schools for the Deaf are participating in this SignWriting >program. If you are participating in such a program, it may be too early >to tell as yet, but is there any evidence that SignWriting has contributed >in any way to your students' ability to read and write in English? (If any >articles have been printed showing that statistically SignWriting does >contribute, please let me know!) > Our advanced SW students enjoy a spanish vocabulary after a few months far in excess of any deaf people we have met who have attended the full time traditional schools for Deaf in Nicaragua. This is mostly because the students use the spanish to access the SW sign in the computerized dictionary file. (Type C-A-S-A, and the ISN sign for house appears. In fact, type C-A, and you need only run down the page to you get to C-A-S-A. So use of the computer dictionary to write in SW reinforces spanish vocabulary recognition.) Because we are able to teach grammatical concepts in ISN using SW as a teaching tool, our students can grasp grammar rules easier. Who first learns what an adjective means in a second language rather than in their first language, anyway? We find it easier to explain aspects of spanish grammar for which their may not be ISN equivalents easier because our students already appreciate what rules of grammar are. However, really, we teach spanish grammar only to a select few advanced students, and then with insufficient time commitment to yield valid results. > 3) Does SignWriting still face continuing controversy, ridicule, >stigma, >etc even today? From what sources, usually? (i.e., Deaf people/leaders, >hearing people, administrators of deaf schools, etc). What is(are) the most >common argument(s) against SignWriting? The elite of the Deaf community in Managua are exceedingly envious of the students and teachers in Bluefields. > > 4) What do you usually say in response to their argument(s) against >SignWriting? > Our students are oblivious to the controversy and therefore not handicapped by it. > 5) Won't the rapid pace of technology, including Internet technology, >simply wipe SignWriting out, reducing it obsolete? Why or why not? After >all, videocameras (useful for signed ASL) are shrinking rapidly in both >size and cost, as are computer chips, and new technology is continually >popping up to replace old ways of doing things. > Rapid pace of technology? Where are you? We have electricity, some places have phones, I met someone once with a flush toilet -- didn't work, though. > 6) What flaws does SignWriting and/or its software still have that >needs >to be worked out? (Since you are all obviously proponents of SignWriting, >I expect positive comments in general; however, every program has its >kinks that it needs to work out, and SignWriting is no exception! :-) ) > We tweaked up the system a little bit, we like to think -- not the software, but some of the punctuation and other symbols. We left the original system about 99% intact. I'm too much of a computer illiterate to comment knowledgably on software. > 7) What is this new profession, "Sign Language Journalism", and >how many >Deaf and/or hearing reporters are in this particular field in North America >and/or the rest of the world, that you know of? And how many readers are >there, approximately, who read materials written in this way? > > 8) As you well know, D/hoh children must learn to write, take speech >therapy, and learn ASL if they are in a Deaf school or a Bi-Bi program. Now >you're asking these children to learn yet another form of language: the >written version of ASL. One argument that could be made against >SignWriting is that it's even more work for these children AND their >teachers, and thus reducing the time for learning written English, which >the children need. What is your response? > My first reaction is not printable. The problem with SW is that it threatens to put Deaf teachers on a par with their hearing counterparts. If Deaf teachers have to learn to read English, a second language, then why shouldn't hearing teachers have to learn to read ASL -- for them a second language. In fact, since hearing people are not blind, SW is easier for them to learn than it is for Deaf people to learn written english -- a coding system based on sounds. So, the playing field still isn't level -- just more level than before. > 9) Have other people tried to put their own, spoken (not signed) >language >into a written form in the past? How did it work? > > Again, you DON'T have to answer every one of these questions! Just >pick a >couple or so, and any experience you share with me would be greatly >appreciated. > > In advance, thanks for any information you can share, > > Alexandra M. > >Valerie :-) > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >Valerie Sutton at the DAC >Deaf Action Committee for SW > >SignWriting > >https://www.SignWriting.org > >Center For Sutton Movement Writing >an educational nonprofit organization >Box 517, La Jolla, CA, 92038-0517, USA >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | ||||||||||||
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