Sign Language: History And Analysis Of Case Studies

Introduction

Sign language has played a significant role in the deaf culture. Individuals who were deaf did not have a voice to communicate with, but when sign language was created it gave deaf individuals a newfound voice. Sign language started a new culture for the deaf community and brought them around the world together. In a deaf community, sign language is a vital form of communication. Despite the difficulties of speaking and learning that deaf people might encounter, they can efficiently and professionally communicate with hearing people, of course, with sign language. The latter, however, has been a central feature of communication throughout human history. Like any other language, sign language has changed and evolved into the structure that people can see at present since the beginning of human communication. Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning. Sign languages are natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. This means that sign languages are not universal and they are not mutually intelligible, although there are also striking similarities among sign languages. Linguists consider both spoken and signed communication must be kinds of natural language, meaning that both emerged through an abstract, protracted aging process and evolved over time without meticulous planning. Sign language should not be confused with body language, a type of nonverbal communication.

The main aims and objectives of this paper are:

1. to collect data about sign language learning in Baku
2. to investigate problems of learning and teaching process of sign language.

Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have developed as handy means of communication and they form the core of local deaf cultures. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hearing, it is also used by hearing individuals, such as those unable to physically speak, those who have trouble with spoken language due to a disability or condition, or those with deaf family members, such as kids of deaf adults.

It is unknown how many sign languages exist worldwide. Every country generally has its own, native sign language, but some of them have more than one. The 2013 edition of Linguistics lists 137 sign languages. Most sign languages have accepted some form of legal recognition, while others have no status at all.

Linguists consider natural sign languages from the other systems that are precursors to them or derived from them, for example, invented manual codes for spoken languages, home signs, ‘baby signs’, and signs learned by non-human primates.

1.1 The history of Sign Language.

Historically, deaf and hard-of-hearing people are said to be known since ancient times. Socrates, in one of his earliest written records of a sign language from the fifth century BC says, ‘If we hadn’t a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present”.

Besides, Friend refers to one of Stokoe`s main works about human sign language. Stokoe suggests that the roots of a language of gestures for example sign languages have their primate. It is as old as the race itself, and its earliest history is equally obscure. Despite the fact that hearing technologies are improved, and that sign language may witness kinds of decline in the future, sign languages still have their well-known position especially among parents who want and encourage their children to learn signs and symbols. It has many dialects and grammatical structures which are learnt by deaf community. Sign language is one of the methods of communication, which is defined as a set of visual symbols or gestures that are used in a very systematic way for words, concepts or ideas of a language. They are expressed through sign language by representing a relationship between the sign and its meaning in spoken language.

1.2 Literature Review

Allen and Anderson have claimed that sign language is seen to take a crucial part in the deaf `s special schools. This language has supporters and opponents. It is the most general and privileged way used by deaf community. In here, deaf people can have a unique education that the purpose of it is to integrate deaf individuals into humanity utilizing language. As a consequence, they can obtain their rescue and not be marginalized. In many educational contexts, an oral method was always used with deaf pupils. A teacher used spoken language while the deaf pupils were obliged to do lipread and to respond in spoken language. Astonishingly, neither teachers were allowed to use sign language nor pupils were given a chance to interact with it during classes. Pupils, though, were signing during breaks. As we can see, to survive, sign language as well as deaf people and those who use it, have been continuously fighting. Deaf children have the right to equal education. According to Barriga, the ability to use sign language gives strength for deaf people to be free , to be able to communicate quickly, to get a profession and to participate in both communities and family life. Sign language has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, mentioned that sign language is the main solution for them. It fits their needs to communicate and express themselves to others, freely. That’s why, deaf people seem to be used to accepting it, learn it, and use it. Not only deaf people, hearing people may use sign language in some situations, too. Disadvantages of sign language, on the other hand, can be related to the fact that it affects the use of spoken language. A sign language requires good face-to-face communication between the addresser and the addressee to deliver a message. The oral way of communication is unlike the sign one, and the latter may seem more difficult especially when taking into account the fact that sign language is not unified. This may cause a misunderstanding of some of its diverse vocabularies.

2.1 Analysis of case studies

This study aims to investigate the special educational system used to teach sign language for deaf and hard of hearing individuals and to see the problems during acquiring process. Moreover, it also explores the current situation of teaching sign language, challenges, and obstacles encountered by teachers using sign language with deaf and hard of hearing children inside the deaf school. This study also attempts to find out the effectiveness of the deaf special education from the perspective of deaf pupils, to figure out to what extent they are satisfied, to know if they face any problems during their learning process and if the educational level meets their needs or not.

Study population

The language acquired by teachers, pupils, and some other specialists in the field of deaf education, as for teachers, because they are the experienced and professionals in the field of teaching deaf children. They must be aware of their pupils knowledge, language progression, and the process of learning. They are able to determine the challenges which they may have encountered as well as the solutions needed to overcome such barriers to be able to teach them in better conditions as possible as it should be. Consequently, as a result, teachers in special deaf education will be able to achieve better performance of teaching inconvenient conditions that the deaf children need and to pave them the way to live as any hearing children inside regular schools. Pupils, on the other hand, come in the first place. They play a central role in special education. They are the ones whom the purpose of inclusive education does exist. Because of them, the researcher was able to shed, to some extent, some light on the benefit of such education and its effectiveness of it on their language progression, learning process, and their life in general. Since they are presently experiencing the process of learning used inside the school, they might have a clear awareness of different difficulties and obstacles they might have came across while learning in such a special educational system. They may have some views, strategies, or solutions which may help them to enhance their academic performance.

2.2.Relating theory and practise

This study was accomplished in the School of Hearing Impaired Children in Baku. The real and the official start of this school was until 1989. It was established to meet the needs of hearing-impaired children. According to the education adviser, the name of this deaf school has witnessed lots of changes. At first, this school was given the name of the deaf and mute youth`s school. Later on, it was changed to be named: the school of deaf and mute children. Finally, its name was modified to a school of hearing impaired children, which is known as the deaf community in Baku. It is a boarding school. It provides board and lodging to some students but allows others to attend during the day only, like a day school

Data collection procedures

Interviews and classroom direct observation were the ways used to collect data for this study. The first step was to seek permission from the supervisor and the Deaf Community School in Baku. Immediately after that, the researcher moved to the school of hearing-impaired children and met the head of the school personally and sought permission to carry out the study. Then the permission was accepted, the researcher met the therapist, pedagogical advisor, and teachers to introduce himself and to inform them about the purpose of his case study.

Meanwhile, the researcher started taking some observations through attending different classes with deaf pupils and interviewed the latter whenever possible. In such a way, gathering information throughout the observations was an attempt to compare, collect, and capture any other data needed for the study as far as possible and in order not to miss any information that might not have been provided in the interviews.

Methodology

To make sense of the data was collected through interviews and observations, the researcher the needed instruments were gathered for data coding and subsequent analysis. The data for this study was analyzed through detailed description and explanations which were being given by the respondents. To establish patterns, trends and relationships from the information gathered and to make the collected data easily interpreted by many people, basic quantitative statistical techniques such as frequencies, percentages, and tables were used.

The methodology of this project is ethnographic and qualitative research. Observation is method used by researcher Through this work in the community it was slowly accepted more and more. This is qualitative methodology that researcher decided to go and have observation. And there are some questionnaires used by researcher on this research paper.

Results

When the case study revealed facts related to the training of teachers in sign language, we wanted to know the teachers` views about sign language. Thus, the ten teachers were asked about the nature of sign language,importance of learning of it, teaching it as a subject in classes, and whether the deaf children seem to learn enough sign language from the teachers as they teach them some other different contents or not.

Teachers` attitudes towards teaching of sign language. 50 percent of the teachers seems to believe that sign language is as natural as Azerbaijani or Turkish. It has its alphabets, vocabularies, and grammar. Only 2 out of 10 teachers state that unlike spoken languages (e.g. Azerbaijani), sign language is not natural. It is not even comparable, linguistically speaking. The number of teachers who responded by no represents a percentage of 20 percent. The 30 percent of teachers, however, gave no response at all related to the nature of sign language. These teachers were 3 in number. Some reasons given by teachers who have belief that sign language is natural were also asked by the researcher. A female teacher has 28 years of experience in teaching 40 illustrate that sign language is a natural language used by deaf children since the babbling stage, who learns his first signs from his mother. Whether we agreed or not, sign language is the deaf children`s mother tongue. So, it is natural, it has its linguistic features and grammar. Further, she said that she had been trained by deaf teachers who master the language very well. If the language was not natural, she could not have been able to acquire it, understand it, use it, and teach it. Another female teacher has only five months of experience in teaching the deaf argued that it is a natural language because no one can understand it unless he learns it. The answers to the second question that asks if the teachers are offering sign language as a taught subject in their classes reflected noticeable results concerning teaching sign language for the deaf. The vast majority of 90 percent of teachers answered by no. Almost all teachers were not offering sign language as a taught subject in the school. Only one male teacher, who has not mention his years of experience in teaching, says that he is offering it as a taught subject in his classes. The teacher claims that he has a specific class devoted only to sign language itself. In this class, he explains the content of the sign language dictionary used in the school to enrich his pupils’ vocabularies. The nine teachers, on the other hand, are not teaching sign language as a subject in the school. Two teachers say they are not offering it as a subject because it is just a means that the teacher uses to explain various content subjects like mathematics or history. Another teacher adds that it is not scheduled in the timetable to be taught as a subject itself. A male teacher has 26 years of experience in teaching that sign language is not scheduled as a taught subject because he relies on the curriculum

The grammar taught at this school follows the same grammar rules of the Azerbaijani language. However, some of these rules seem to be dropped in sign language. For instance in the first sentence and the second sentence the definite article “the“ is not used before the tow words “sign and baby“. Another thing was dropped which is the sign that represents the question mark in the second sentence. Although it might seem that the Azerbaijani language grammar is not entirely applicable, teachers follow it as an alternative in the absence of available sources to teach sign language and its real grammar that fits its linguistic features and nature.

Barriers and challenges to the teaching of sign language

Findings of this study indicate that there are some challenges and barriers encountered by deaf pupils and their teachers in particular. First, the results revealed that there is no Azerbaijani Sign Language in Baku neither any sign languages are being used in the school of hearing-impaired children. Second, there is a need for real sources of sign language, academically speaking. Also, there is lack of equipments in this school. Therefore, the school must be well equipped.

Many people who have no or minimal experience with sign language users, including parents of deaf children and the professionals who advise them, have fears about the difficulty of learning a sign language. Certainly, they might lack the resources or infrastructure to do so crucial but separate issue. What concerns us here is that they might initially assume they are incapable of learning to sign well enough to be able to help their child’s language development. The same paediatric audiologist’s websites mentioned earlier says, ‘Parents who do not know sign language well cannot provide a rich language environment for their child’. With little prior knowledge of signing , parents and professionals can be vulnerable to a bias against bringing a sign language into the lives of children who, in fact, could benefit greatly from sign language during a critical time for language and cognitive development. Surely, learning a second language as an adult is challenging, but no scholarly study has yet to find that sign languages are more difficult. Motivation is a crucial component in all second language learning, and parents who find themselves with a deaf child are likely to have strong motivation due to an impulse to communicate with their child in effective ways. The fear that parents can not learn to sign well enough to serve as good language models for their children should be put aside: parents do not have to be the most fluent signing models for their children. Deaf children, if exposed to good signing models outside the family, will learn to sign well even if their parents are less than fluent. Moreover, deaf children whose parents are able to communicate with them with sign language benefit in other ways: they use more complex language with one another with more positive outcome than those who do not sign at all, and they show early language expressiveness on a par with hearing children of the same age. With language learning support (a teacher, tutor, other signers, the child’s deaf peers and the parents), family members learning a sign language, for example, ASL or German Sign Language (DGS), at the same time as the deaf child, powerfully enhance family communication and promote a typical language acquisition process, which is key for the child’s lifelong success. S ign language, their children will drift away from the family and become part of a social world of deaf signers, a deaf culture.

The opposite has been shown to be true. Deaf children who grow up bilingually and can communicate with their parents in a sign language (and in a visual modality) are much more likely to have strong, healthy family ties than those deaf people who are unable to speak well or hear well enough to have communication with their parents because neither they nor their parents learned a sign language. There are reports indicating that some oral deaf people and hearing parents of deaf children wish they had had an opportunity to learn sign language earlier but were advised against doing so. One of the comments to the Post article on Di Marco ended with the bleak statement, ‘I was a victim of oral monolingual education’. In their social world (or shared culture), deaf people view themselves as whole, well and empowered. In contrast, the medical profession views deaf people as having a medical condition or pathology that they are obligated to address through medical means. Likewise, professions such as audiology and hearing sciences see it as their duty to provide treatments, therapies and interventions. Educators design pedagogy that is special or differentiated from that of other children. This combination of historical negative view of deaf people in society and the professions often communicates to parents that if they allow their deaf children to learn a sign language, their children will identify with this community and not the family.

Conclusion:

There are not a lot of researches about how icrucial Sign Language is for Deaf Community. Deaf of hearing people suffer from isolation from their own family when both they and their families do not have access to Sign Language. This lack of understanding creates rifts within the relationships, making it more difficult to communicate. This is avoidable by families being properly informed in the beginning and taking advantage of the multitude of free classes available. For those Deaf students who are in schools that do not use Sign Language may continue to have limited access to their education. The same issue exists for children who arrive at kindergarten with no language and have to start from the very beginning before they can begin acquiring knowledge. Communication with the hearing community is fraught with problems, but most of these conflicts stem from language and communication issues that could easily be solved. All of these negative experiences pale in comparison to the stories of the discovery of Sign Language. The joy, and finding of self described by individuals is an experience all Deaf people should have access to.

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