Deaf teacher strives to make learning through sign language fun for hearing-impaired pupils
Anita Yu, 38, was among the first batch of 13 graduates in CUHK’s sign language teaching course and wants more to be done for hearing-impaired students in the city
She was born deaf and while Anita Yu On-lam went to a school for the hearing-impaired, she struggled to learn because teachers did not use sign language during lessons.
“Teachers there only taught using speech [so] it was mainly guesswork in the classroom,” Yu, who cannot hear anything at all without the help of hearing aids, said of her experience. She added that she gained most of her knowledge from reading up on her own.
Yu, now 38, became a sign language teacher about 10 years ago.
She teaches young children in Chinese University’s Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment in Deaf Education programme, where deaf and hearing pupils learn through a combination of sign language and speech.
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On Monday, Yu was among the first batch of 13 hearing-impaired individuals to graduate from Chinese University’s Certificate Programme in Sign Language Teaching, which aims to equip teachers with practical knowledge of sign language teaching and help them develop the skills to teach different learners, among other things.