New school to use signs as 1st language
Keiko Katayama Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
The nation's first accredited school for hearing-impaired children offering classes based on Japanese sign language (JSL) is scheduled to open in Tokyo next spring. It is expected that an educational approach that treats JSL as the students' first language will be a major step toward expanding the available options in deaf education.
The opening of the new school has been made possible by a central government program allowing local municipalities to launch special deregulated structural reform zones, dubbed tokku. The Tokyo metropolitan government applied to the central government for the status to implement the project, which was approved in March.
Featuring a different grammatical system from that of Japanese, JSL can be acquired naturally by hearing-impaired children without going through any special training. There are also babbling "words" just like Japanese, and its grammar system--the movements of facial features or the neck in addition to hands, fingers and arms can serve as import!ant grammatical elements--and its rich variety of vocabulary allows users to express complicated ideas.
Traditionally, the nation's deaf education has mainly encouraged children to read the movement of lips by wearing hearing aids and doing vocal exercises to learn Japanese. on the other hand, sign language has been given lower priority than such training because sign language has long been treated as a major obstacle keeping such children from learning Japanese.
According to a survey conducted in 2004 by the National Institute of Special Needs Education, 70 percent of the nation's primary schools for the deaf and 90 percent of middle schools for such students used sign language in some circumstances, such as daily conversation. However, it is often the case that the type of sign language used in such cases is called "simu-com," or simultaneous communication--something different from JSL--in which word-level gestures are simply used in accordance to the word order of Japanese.
A nonprofit organization called the Bilingual Bicultural Education Center for Deaf Children will open the new school, which will be modeled on Tatsunoko Gakuen, a school that the group has operated in Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo, since 1999.
Tatsunoko Gakuen is a "free school," a term describing an alternative educational institution without government accreditation. Many free schools have been established to help children who find it difficult to keep up with mainstream education. Both Tatsunoko Gakuen and the new school will offer JSL-based education, but the new school will be accredited.
The new school aims at offering "bilingual" education under which students will be encouraged to first develop cognitive abilities through JSL, while also learning how to read and write Japanese.
Nondisabled children can learn spoken language naturally by listening to how those around them speak, but this cannot be expected for hearing-impaired children. If such children are forced into pronunciation practice without enough phonetic experience, they will suffer difficulties similar to those that would be seen if nondisabled people were to try to learn a foreign language just by looking at the speaker's mouth movements without hearing any sound.
But this has been the traditional approach in the nation's deaf education, which often causes wide gaps among individual hearing-impaired children in terms of acquiring Japanese. As a result, some of them have insufficient skills in both Japanese and sign language.
In the United States and Northern European countries, on the other hand, "bilingual education" has been another option for the past two decades, allowing children to master sign language first and then learn the language of the nondisabled population.
In Denmark, a survey showed that there was no apparent gap between the scholastic abilities of hearing-impaired and nondisabled students as measured by university entrance exams. As a result, experts have stressed how import!ant it is for such children to learn sign language first.
"Deaf education up to now has had the goal of bringing hearing-impaired children closer to their nondisabled counterparts as much as possible," said Tomoko Hasebe, one of those working for the new school, for which full funding is still pending. "By encouraging them to master JSL, we'd like to help our students develop confidence in themselves and have a strong enough ego to enable them to express what they'd like to say."
Meanwhile, developments in linguistics and brain studies have shed light on the merit of JSL as a language.
Research led by Associate Prof. Kuniyoshi Sakai of Tokyo University has revealed that whether a person is speaking Japanese or using JSL, the exact same parts of the brain come into play.
It has also been found that just as damage to the left part of the brain causes impairment or loss of spoken language, JSL users suffer the impairment or loss of their sign language if the same part of the brain is damaged.
"Many people misunderstand JSL as just an extension of ordinary gestures," Sakai said. "However, it has a complete grammatical system and enables users to express abstract ideas. Allowing [hearing-impaired] children to learn by using a language they can acquire naturally can serve as a fundamental basis for them to develop their intellects, and it's an import!ant educational option."
(Jun. 21, 2007)
Keiko Katayama Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
The nation's first accredited school for hearing-impaired children offering classes based on Japanese sign language (JSL) is scheduled to open in Tokyo next spring. It is expected that an educational approach that treats JSL as the students' first language will be a major step toward expanding the available options in deaf education.
The opening of the new school has been made possible by a central government program allowing local municipalities to launch special deregulated structural reform zones, dubbed tokku. The Tokyo metropolitan government applied to the central government for the status to implement the project, which was approved in March.
Featuring a different grammatical system from that of Japanese, JSL can be acquired naturally by hearing-impaired children without going through any special training. There are also babbling "words" just like Japanese, and its grammar system--the movements of facial features or the neck in addition to hands, fingers and arms can serve as import!ant grammatical elements--and its rich variety of vocabulary allows users to express complicated ideas.
Traditionally, the nation's deaf education has mainly encouraged children to read the movement of lips by wearing hearing aids and doing vocal exercises to learn Japanese. on the other hand, sign language has been given lower priority than such training because sign language has long been treated as a major obstacle keeping such children from learning Japanese.
According to a survey conducted in 2004 by the National Institute of Special Needs Education, 70 percent of the nation's primary schools for the deaf and 90 percent of middle schools for such students used sign language in some circumstances, such as daily conversation. However, it is often the case that the type of sign language used in such cases is called "simu-com," or simultaneous communication--something different from JSL--in which word-level gestures are simply used in accordance to the word order of Japanese.
A nonprofit organization called the Bilingual Bicultural Education Center for Deaf Children will open the new school, which will be modeled on Tatsunoko Gakuen, a school that the group has operated in Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo, since 1999.
Tatsunoko Gakuen is a "free school," a term describing an alternative educational institution without government accreditation. Many free schools have been established to help children who find it difficult to keep up with mainstream education. Both Tatsunoko Gakuen and the new school will offer JSL-based education, but the new school will be accredited.
The new school aims at offering "bilingual" education under which students will be encouraged to first develop cognitive abilities through JSL, while also learning how to read and write Japanese.
Nondisabled children can learn spoken language naturally by listening to how those around them speak, but this cannot be expected for hearing-impaired children. If such children are forced into pronunciation practice without enough phonetic experience, they will suffer difficulties similar to those that would be seen if nondisabled people were to try to learn a foreign language just by looking at the speaker's mouth movements without hearing any sound.
But this has been the traditional approach in the nation's deaf education, which often causes wide gaps among individual hearing-impaired children in terms of acquiring Japanese. As a result, some of them have insufficient skills in both Japanese and sign language.
In the United States and Northern European countries, on the other hand, "bilingual education" has been another option for the past two decades, allowing children to master sign language first and then learn the language of the nondisabled population.
In Denmark, a survey showed that there was no apparent gap between the scholastic abilities of hearing-impaired and nondisabled students as measured by university entrance exams. As a result, experts have stressed how import!ant it is for such children to learn sign language first.
"Deaf education up to now has had the goal of bringing hearing-impaired children closer to their nondisabled counterparts as much as possible," said Tomoko Hasebe, one of those working for the new school, for which full funding is still pending. "By encouraging them to master JSL, we'd like to help our students develop confidence in themselves and have a strong enough ego to enable them to express what they'd like to say."
Meanwhile, developments in linguistics and brain studies have shed light on the merit of JSL as a language.
Research led by Associate Prof. Kuniyoshi Sakai of Tokyo University has revealed that whether a person is speaking Japanese or using JSL, the exact same parts of the brain come into play.
It has also been found that just as damage to the left part of the brain causes impairment or loss of spoken language, JSL users suffer the impairment or loss of their sign language if the same part of the brain is damaged.
"Many people misunderstand JSL as just an extension of ordinary gestures," Sakai said. "However, it has a complete grammatical system and enables users to express abstract ideas. Allowing [hearing-impaired] children to learn by using a language they can acquire naturally can serve as a fundamental basis for them to develop their intellects, and it's an import!ant educational option."
(Jun. 21, 2007)