Mar 2017 – Life in Eureka

As a deaf teacher aide, ESOL tutor, NZSL tutor in me, something bought me attention in the ESOL classroom this month.How can any refugee students understand our native language – English if they come from Spain, Afghanistan, Columbia or China? The answer is difficult to grasp to understand our English speaking language even written language than sign language.Any ESOL teachers expect every refugee students to learn to listen the sounding out in English such in a conversation first. The ESOL teacher will write down the starter word, e.g., apple, the book on the white board and repeat saying the phrase.In the classroom, I noticed some of the hearing refugee students are struggling to learn to hear the sound of any words by looking at the sentence. Not all of them were able to find the word correctly after three weeks. They are still working on finding the word by saying out loud. Then they were told to write a word such as ‘apple’ without looking at the dictionary book. I looked up the survey result from many ESOL resources and the average result were 45% failed in listening and learning while 25% failed to read and write but they understood any words.mm, as a deaf ESOL signer/tutor/teacher aide with three languages – English, New Zealand Sign Language and English Signed language.I assist and supporting one Deaf refugee citizenship person in the same classroom as above. I use three languages, and lip read the ESOL teacher while this teacher is teaching all the students in the same room. It sounds an awfully lot of work for me to do than this ESOL teacher. However, this ESOL teacher uses less minimise of signs to this deaf student and less writing in the book. Impossible! Impossible!This ESOL teacher does not understand in our Deaf Sign Language and Deaf Culture. I gave a few excellent resources about Deaf people in the ESOL school, sign language and teaching methods with an ESOL Deaf student to this person and the director of the centre. There is a lot of works in the Literacy and Numeracy area from the Ministry of Education for Adult people including Deaf, Learning disabilities and refugee people in ESOL and Literacy courses in NZ.How the history of the first Deaf Education School established in New Zealand?Back in the 1860s, there was no Deaf school in New Zealand, and there were many families who have d/Deaf children here. The parents sent their Deaf child to England, Australia even to the USA where there were Deaf Schools. It was not very cheap to send their Deaf child to school by ship, and it was a very long way from home. In the early census record in New Zealand, it showed the year in 1878.”Deaf and Dumb.—The total number returned was 92; 25 of whom were stated to be “dumb,” but deafness from birth being a cause of dumbness, it is presumed that, in using the word “dumb,” deaf and dumb persons were referred to 58 of the total number were between 5 and 20 years of age, and 31 were upwards of 20 years of age.”https://www3.stats.govt.nz/historic_publications/1878-census/1878-results-census.html#idsect1_1_1927The first Deaf School established in Sumner, Christchurch, New Zealand in 1880. BUT there was a first teacher of the Deaf, and it was Miss Dorcas Mitchell of UK via Australia. She taught forty-two deaf children including eight of the Bradley Deaf children prior to 1877 and received no government assistance. Sadly Miss Dorcas Mitchell was not chosen to work for the Deaf Education as a Director by the Government and the Member of the Parliment chosen Gerit van Asch from England via The Netherlands. There were two different methods of teaching Deaf children in the early days – one was sign language by D. Mitchell while the second was oralist method by Gerit van Asch. However, during 1880, there was an international conference Education of the Deaf, in Milan there were many deaf educators including hearing educators. It was called ‘The Milan Conference’, and that was the time many educators banned sign language from being taught in the classroom. Many hearing educators believed oral education was better than signed language even they did not include a small number of Deaf educators during the voting system in Milan conference. But there were three Deaf directors of Europe, and they preferred to the used oral method.The sign language returned from time to time in 1910 to 1970s but not in the classrooms. Until the first sign language introduced to the Ministry of Education was a Total Communication (TC)- full English grammar including facial expression, body gestures, listening, speech, lip reading and finger spellings in the 1980s. That was an awfully lot of signs and the work to lip read, to write down even to learn to read for any Deaf person like me. Today we have many options of sign languages such as TC, NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language) and International Sign languages which are borrowed signs from ASL (America Sign Language), Auslan, British Signs. There is one more sign which we do not use

Source: ahhhhh! What wrong with our own NZSL in ESOL teaching?