Found In Ceylon

A Personal Revolution in Teaching

In our first training session, Anne imparted to me her personal mantra: “every teacher of the deaf is a teacher of language.” In just a few days, my teaching style would undergo a metamorphosis guided by Anne, who draws from her 35 years of experience in teaching deaf children in England.

Five weeks ago, I declared that I had learned all there was to know about English education for the deaf in Sri Lanka. In many ways, that statement still stands true.

However, as time passed, what grew more salient to me was not the condition of Sri Lankan education itself, but how to actually teach conversational English language skills.

After weeks of teaching, I was getting myself into a rut. Half my classes had learned new vocabulary words: animals, foods, numbers, sports, and feelings (most of which they had learned previously from Sophie but forgotten!). I purchased beautiful, full-color posters of different word categories like body parts, animals, and numbers to reinforce their expanding vocabularies.

The other half–my Grade 10 and 11 classes–were working on pronoun declensions (I, you, we, they), covering both the subject and direct-object cases (they vs. them). I was encouraging them to write simple subject-verb-object sentences using names, personal nouns, and pronouns, with fair success.

Still, I was feeling somewhat discouraged. Sure, my pupils could name a lot of things around them, but when were they going to pick up the ability to write a short letter, e-mail, or text message? More importantly, how could I teach them this–the spontaneous use of English?

Sri Lanka, in a different age marked by spice routes and caliphates, was known as Serendib. This Arabic word is the root of our modern English word, “serendipity.” While its name has changed, Sri Lanka is still rife with serendipitous stories of happy, fluke accidents, and I’m happy that one of these tales involves me and teaching.

Anne couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. I was ready for new teaching techniques, and there is just four weeks left in the school year. But let’s stop talking about me for a bit.

There will come a time when I leave Sri Lanka, so it’s far more important to train the employed teachers at Rohana, because they will stay much longer and exert far more crucial influence on the children’s education than I ever will. That was Anne’s mission; I’m just a bonus pupil in this great scheme. Still, she trained me one-on-one after school.

“Right now, you’re just teaching labels. Table, sun, happy, mother, chair, book. But labels isn’t language,” she said at that first training session.

Suddenly, all my vague frustrations with my teaching progress had crystallized into one clear statement: I was just teaching labels. Yes, yes, I thought. It’s time to teach language.

She added that there was nothing wrong with teaching labels, and that you would have to do that anyway to build up a good vocabulary.

“Also, less fingerspelling, more writing,” she said.

Duh, I thought. I had gotten into this routine where I’d sign a word–say, “mango”–and the class would fingerspell it. Sure, I varied this, but it was basically fingerspelling every single day. I hadn’t realized that, really, the children were writing down “mango” only three or four times over several classes (including on the test).

Anne explained that, when you go to the market to buy toothpaste, you don’t fingerspell “toothpaste” to the merchant. You write it down. Also, by writing down words, you learn what the shape of the word is, and how it’s supposed to look. Writing things down is critical for deaf pupils because they can’t depend on the word’s sound to extract its spelling and shape.

I thought it was amazing that this had to be explained to me, a deaf person. I went through years of deaf education; shouldn’t I already know all of this by heart? The answer, apparently, was, “hell, no!”

In our second training session, Anne introduced to me the written conversation method. It revolves around the idea of creating a “living language,” where the words and concepts taught belong to the pupils, not the teacher. By using pupil-driven instruction, the subject matter is far more relevant to them and they are able to see how they can make English work the way they want it to.

An example of this method, which originated a few decades ago in the Netherlands, is where the teacher brings an interesting photograph (in this example, a recent flood in Kalutara) to the class and have the pupils look at it. Then they chime in with their observations, and the teacher turns these signed observations into written English. One pupil signs, “flood,” and the teacher writes down, “I see flood.” Another pupil says, “boat help,” which turns into “Boat helps people.”

This continues until the whole board is filled with several sentences that have been created by the pupils themselves. Then you work with this material in many ways, like extracting key words for vocabulary-building, writing similar sentences, removing words for fill-in-the-blank exercises, and more.

One advantage of this technique is that you get to use words that are not constrained to one topic group (fruits, sports, etc.). Also, you can introduce both nouns and verbs (which I hadn’t taught as much because they are not neatly categorized into topic groups).

It’s so ingenious that I’m surprised it had to be “invented” at all. I tried this written conversation method on Wednesday with two classes.

By Friday, they were writing completely new sentences with words that were generated from Wednesday’s written conversation lesson. I was then able to introduce them to the concept of nouns and verbs, explain that English sentences generally followed the subject-verb-object structure, and had them rearrange words in erroneous sentences (i.e., “Prasanna book read.”) All in fifty minutes.

The children completely got it! I couldn’t believe it. I was so ecstatic to see them writing real English sentences and figure out (with about 75% accuracy) which words were nouns and which were verbs.

What I’ve detailed here is just a few examples of the many methods Anne trained me–and four other teachers at Rohana–to use. To explain all of them would be to write a very long blog.

So for now, it’s sufficient to say here, like I said to her at dinner, “my teaching really has changed 180 degrees because of you, Anne.”

I am truly excited about teaching again because now I have some tools with which to encourage language development. Now I’ve only got a few weeks left before the pupils go home and forget it all.

There are many, many ways to make a difference in Sri Lanka. Anne made a difference; it’s the best type of difference because it keeps on working via other people for a long, long time.

Before I end this post, I also want to mention that Anne and I discussed one interesting issue regarding questions (like who, why, what) in Sinhala Sign Language. Because I’m particularly interested in other deaf people’s perspectives, I’ve posted an entertaining, informative blog about this subject at DeafDC.com–take a look at Who’s On First!

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