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[Timuli]

Hope the collective wisdom of this forum can help a teacher out.
A friend who works at a University has a deaf student in his class(probably around 20 - 30 students in the class). The overall class level is good, and student motivation is no problem. The deaf student is also really motivated and eager to participate and do all the activities.

However, how would you go about in teaching this student while at the same time paying equal attention to everybody else. Having all materials written out would be one way I suppose, but that could lead to too much writting on the board which will cut into talking time.

Any other teachers encountered such a situation? How did you deal with it? Any extra ideas would be appreciated. As said, the student is very eager and determined to study english, so thats already a good thing.

[Gordon]

Is there no one at the university who will sign for him? That would make all the difference, so the student could interact. I've taught a student before that was deaf and mute (don't ask me why he was in the class). There was an interpreter that translated between the two of us.

[sidjameson]

I've taught a few deaf students at my uni. Bloody shocked first time I came across it. I mean the irony of it all. but actually just like your friends, my studetn was eager and a jo to teach. They alwasy provided a signer though. I told the signer what I was going to do the following week and they always wrote out a script for the studetn whenver possible. I tended to pair mysef up with the student as well in class activities.

[shmooj]

[Gordon]

[Eric]

I think which language is used for signing is very relevent. Here in North America most deaf speakers communicate in american sign language which is related to english, but has a syntax related to french.

My advice for teaching a student with hearing loss, is to seat the student toward the front, and reinforce as much as you can with visual stimuli. Deafness is not an all or nothing thing so you might want to find out if your student has mild, moderate , severe hearing loss or is completely deaf. If the student has a mild moderate hearing loss they might be able to gain some auditory cues while watching your mouth for other cues. I hope this helps.

Eric

[TokyoLiz]

I've had hearing and visually impaired people, children and adults, in my ESL and EFL classes both here in Japan and in Canada, my home country.

Teaching English to hearing impaired students -

It really depends on their level of impairment. Does the student have a hearing aid? Is he or she able to lip read in the native language? Is the student literate in the native language? You can go from there.

When it comes to literacy, there are lots of problems. Sometimes hearing impaired people have trouble with literacy in their own language - this may present a problem when teaching grammar.

Another thing to consider - Japanese Shuwa, like American Sign Language, has a different grammar from spoken Japanese. As a result, the profoundly deaf student who relies on Shuwa may have communication problems in Japanese. This certainly happens between hearing impaired North Americans using American Sign Language and English speakers.

So, what do you do in the classroom? If you're teaching grammar, just stay away from recorded stuff, and make sure that all the verbal stuff is backed by text. If you're teaching conversation, A/B pair activities which allow the students to 'discover' the dialogue might be workable, depending on whether or not the student has some hearing or can lip read.

With visually impaired students, you've just got to be more aware of all the visual information that language lessons depend on, and adapt heavily and get creative.

[shmooj]

[Gordon]

[TokyoLiz]

FYI, Japanese sign is called Shuwa. In Shuwa, you can sign whole words or you can finger spell kana.

In N. America, there are two dominant forms of sign - American Sign Langauge and English sign. ASL has a different grammar from English. English sign, I believe, is derived from English grammar.

Then there are other kinds of sign - I've met some people who have developed elaborate and idiosyncratic sign systems in order to communicate with friends and family before they learned ASL.

One of my signing buddies, a Canadian who is conversant in ASL, can get the gist of a Shuwa conversation though he'd never seen it before coming to Japan.

[DeafbyDeaf.org]

Hi all,

I am a Visiting Professor of Special Education at Beijing Union University's College of Special Education. I teach Deaf (yes, that's a proper noun) students English and American Sign Language enrolled in token degree programs, and teach the Sociology of Deafness and Disability to teacher education majors. I am Deaf and an American.

I apologize for not entering the discussion sooner.

Your friend appears to have happened upon a defacto inclusive education situation. Inclusive education is an assimilationist approach to teaching and learning for "people with disabilities." This is becoming somewhat common for Deaf learners at the University level in the U.S. I studied for all three of my degrees in hearing institutions. This is a right hard fought for by Deaf and disabled peoples, however it should be pointed out that the Deaf communities of the More Developed Nations do not support inclusive education for pre-K-12 Deaf learners, only the legal right to access public education for all children. Based upon longitudinal studies and real-world outcomes, we consider the "least restrictive environment" (LRE) for Deaf learners to be in special programs and schools which respect the linguistically distinct needs of the Deaf. See: http://www.nad.org/infocenter/newsroom/positions/inclusion.html
Deaf people in the English-speaking world do not usually self-identify as disabled, and find the use of such euphemisms as "hearing impaired" patently offensive. Any party to this discussion who have read older published journals and books authored, or co-authored, by Deaf people which contain such language (I King Jordan for example) may assume that this is in all probability a publishing house conformity, not a personal endorsement of the term. See: http://www.nad.org/infocenter/infotogo/dcc/terms.html That said:
The inclusion of a Deaf student in a hearing classroom is a tricky situation. All I can offer are a few suggestions. Success depends upon how hard your friend is willing to work at inclusion and what the student's needs actually are, and communicating about those needs.
First, I recommend a needs assessment. The student is the best, and should be the chief, source of information. Perhaps your friend has done this already. Based upon what the student expresses, I would then seek to modify my lesson plans. Some suggestions--I don't know the specifics, so maybe some of these are not appropriate:
Reread your lesson plan and text from a Deaf perspective. Depending upon your student's age at deafness, and the degree of residual hearing the student has, and the type of pedagogy the student undertook K-12 education, you will want to consider some important issues.
What are the student's goals? The focus should be on written English, these folks have enough difficulty learning to speak their host languages, they should not be expected to undertake spoken foreign languages as well, unless they have an expressed desire for doing so.
What is the student's host language (in this case Japanese) literacy level? Will the student be able to comprehend the subject matter in the aural English text being used?
Prior "knowledges." Consider what aural cues are embedded in the lessons and make notes on how to make sense of them to the learner.
If you are in a multimedia classroom use your resources, if not design visuals to support your objectives.
Consider, if your students signs, and if he or she has made it into a University on more than a patronage basis, the student probably does, then download ASL or BSL software and have your student study and teach you the signs that support the English vocabulary. Caution: ASL is NOT related to English. Signs are seldom representations of spoken words. Since I am assuming the teacher does not sign, the best we could hope for are deriving some visual support from one of these two linguistically complete languages in vocabulary acquisition. Also note that ASL and BSL are mutually unintelligible languages, so it would be best to stick with one.
Keep in mind that the fossilization errors for a native signer will differ from those of hearing students. In other words, the mistakes you see in the Deaf student's English efforts will likely differ from those of your hearing students.
Keep the student�s visual field open, allow the student to move wherever necessary and to jump up and write down any thing on the blackboard. (I did this throughout my University studies, it shocked many students and professors and I was told that my social skill�s development needed some polishing.)
About sign language interpreters: Japan has legal protections for accommodating this need and you should request this from your school with an aural Japanese/English interpreter. However, an interpreter does not simply take care of the situation, even if they are of excellent quality. In many cases, sign interpreters are not adequately trained, not fluent in the student's native sign, but only the pidgin sign used to teach the host language of a given country, and are given to view Deaf people as their "patients" rather than themselves as employee's of the learner. Interpreters of quality are usually CODAS (Children of Deaf Adults) and you can sometimes find a retiree to volunteer through the local Deaf Association. There is a an extreme shortage of qualified ASL interpreters in the US, if Japan is in a similar state, then I wouldn�t hold my breath until one shows up for class.
Transcriptions maybe a better bet if you could arrange for a real-time onsite person fluent in English.
Use other students to explain concepts in writing, it can be beneficial to both students under the right circumstances�group writing exercises, drama exercises, and so on.
Cultural materials abound for Deaf history and languages. If the student is a beginner, you might want to have a few items translated, all, or in part. These can serve as good motivational tools for all students in your class. Moore and Panara's Great Deaf Americans (1996) is a little dated, but works well for my students in providing cultural vignettes that are inspiring and appropriate for early intermediate readers, or beginners with vocabulary support.
If your friend likes, he or she could learn the American Manual Alphabet rather quickly and use it as a TPR exercise for the entire class to support spelling and to give the Deaf learner something cognitively weak, but better than nothing, to hold on to in visual lingual mode. AMA is not ASL, but a tool we use for borrowing from the host language. When communicating among ourselves, the need for borrowing is minimal. Signs have been used to support learning in hearing ESL classrooms since the 1970s, but I have not read any studies that confirm their utility. (Seems reasonable to me.)
Note that the idea of English as a second language is a cornerstone of Deaf education in the West and that many resources on this topic are available, and many of those can possibly be adapted to address the needs of a Deaf EFL situation.
Here are some resources:
http://211.65.64.33/default/sign/sign/sign.html A website with some basic Japanese, Chinese, and ASL vocabulary�Caution: many of the signs are wrong.
http://www.dinf.ne.jp/doc/english/asia/resource/z00ap/005/top.html#contents Asian and Pacific Journal on Disability
http://www.rit.edu/%7Eseawww/ SEA (Supporting ESL for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Learners)
http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/browser.htm Michigan State�s ASL Online Dictionary
http://clerccenter.gallaudet.edu/infotogo/072.html Clerc Center at Gally�s info online Bi- Lingual Education for the Deaf
http://ericec.org/digests/prodfly.html ERIC Clearing House of Disability

Also see Teaching English to Deaf Learners in China under posted on the Deaf Ed discussion forum for this website.

Good Luck!

[shmooj]

Wowee that was superb... and very interesting reading even though I'm not teaching Deaf students

[Gordon]

Yes, very interesting. But who can do all of that and have that kind of support in Japan? There are some good tips though.

[articulate_ink]

[DeafbyDeaf.org]

http://www.jfd.or.jp/en/projects.html