Last year, my housemates and I decided to tackle the Fijian Language. We took lessons each week for 12 weeks to learn how to speak Fijian. Unfortunately, our ability to pick up the language has been minimal. It's difficult to understand because when spoken, it sounds like an incredibly long sentence without pauses, breaks, articles or discreet words. It's hard to pick out nouns from verbs from articles. Additionally, one can get by very easily without speaking Fijian. It doesn't really have many advantages when you're out and about and everyone speaks some English anyway. There's also the other half of the population who speak Hindi and don't know a word of Fijian, so English becomes the common language in most situations.
At school the children speak English, albeit in a simplified, broken manner. This is mainly due to lack of exposure and intellectual impairment. For example, the other day one of the students asked me: "You have my change? I keep here then on Wednesday, I already bring. You keep for Friday sports?" which translates to: "Can you please keep my change of clothes with you until Friday? Then I don't have to bring another change of clothes for Friday sports."
It's not quite an English-as-a-second-language issue, as I've heard other children who are not enrolled at the school speak in sentences that are better formed than those of the students at our school.
So anyway, the point is, there is a mode of communication through English that is somewhat reliable at school and in the community.
However, this has not been the case for the hearing impaired children and teachers at our school. The ONLY means of communication so far has been through the school's sign language interpreter. I feel really bad that I haven't been able to communicate appropriately with the teachers and students at school. Even some of the teachers are still unable to communicate in sign language. This may be due to a number of different reasons, but my view is that out of respect to the entire school community, those working at the school MUST learn sign language.
That is what I've started to do in the past 2 weeks.
I've attempted to pick up as much as I can at school but the students sign REALLY quickly and at times they are inaccurate with their signs. Small nuances that make a huge difference in differentiating between signs such as "I", "my", "I'm" and "me". Being one of the teaching staff at school as well, I feel that it's appropriate to learn to increase the children's exposure to proper sign language. Therefore, there's been no excuse but to take myself along to the the Deaf Association twice a week to learn Fijian Sign Language. Apparently it's very similar to AusLAN but what the differences actually are, I'm not entirely sure.
One more thing - I've been trying to show the whole school that incorporating gross and fine motor skills into classwork to demonstrate concrete examples will enhance learning experiences. This includes the hearing impaired children because I believe that it's not only the "physically impaired" children that require maximised exposure to gross and fine motor skills. Again, I may be over-stepping my boundaries. Last week I wasn't a psychologist and this week, I'm definitely NOT a classroom teacher. However, I do feel that doing gross and fine motor activities, combined with instructions in signed and voiced language can't be doing much harm to the children.
No comments:
Post a Comment