Chiu Man-ying: Sign Language Is Communication, Not Face

Using sign to give kids a voice

Lin Ya-hsiu, a participant in the Keep Walking program, is upset that parents are asking their hearing-impaired kids to "learn to speak like 'normal' people, and not to learn to sign." Chiu Man-ying, a Ministry of Education sign-language trainer and teacher at the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired (TSHI), echoes Lin's view.

"I can understand parents' worries about their children going out into the world," says Chiu, who has been educating the hearing-impaired for more than 30 years, "but this really isn't an effective way to deal with the situation."

Chiu mentions THSI's first grade as an example-every year they get seven or eight new students at mid-semester as kids unable to adapt to the ordinary school system give up and enroll at THSI. Some of these hearing-impaired students are unwilling to sign because they firmly believe they can speak. The problem is that they can't speak clearly enough for their interlocutors to understand them. Still other students have parents who buy them NT$400,000 hearing aids, but don't enroll them in a rehabilitation program. When they start using their hearing aids, they discover that the world is noisy and hard to follow. Frustrated, they end up removing their hearing aids and retreating into their silent worlds.

Chiu believes that unless kids are engaged in spoken-language training from an early age, they're going to get frustrated and give up. Without sign language to fall back on, they become isolated and have issues with their intellectual and emotional development.

Signing is hot

"Sign language is just a means of communicating," says Chiu. "It's got nothing to do with face." In some families in which the parents and children are hearing impaired, the kids begin signing at a very early age. According to Chiu, such kids are not only very adept at signing, but also healthy, upbeat, and sociable.

She recommends that hearing-impaired students who don't speak clearly adopt an integrated approach to communication that supplements the spoken word with gestures and facial expressions. Doing so will help them to be better understood and to build better relationships. For example, they can blink their eyes to show agreement, waggle their tongues to indicate "no" or "there isn't any," and puff up their cheeks to express the idea "I want" or "I'm going to." Signs like these are easy and fun.

Still, signing is hot. Chiu, who got the Wu Deng Jiang signing competition going by taking hearing-impaired students to perform a song on TV 28 years ago, says that her community-college signing classes are always full and that interest in learning to sign remains high. In fact, on 5 September, a group of her hearing students will compete in an invitational signing-performance competition prior to the 21st Summer Deaflympics Taipei 2009.

Chiu spends so much of her time using signing to communicate with the hearing impaired, many people assume that she is hearing impaired herself. Chiu revels in this particular misapprehension.