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Sign of progress

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In a Primary One classroom at St John the Baptist Catholic Primary School in Kowloon Bay, children don't just use their hands to attract the teacher's attention - some use their hands to answer the teachers' questions.

Only six of the 30 students are deaf, but sign language has become an integral part of all of the children's classroom experience under an innovative project claimed to be the first of its kind in Asia.

The project, conducted by Chinese University's Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, strives to fully integrate deaf students into a mainstream school by helping them to become 'bilingual' through learning both sign and spoken language.

Yesterday, project manager Chris Yiu Kun-man presented early research findings from the first two years of the seven-year project at the China Research Festival at University College London.

Mr Yiu, who has been working in the field of deaf education for nearly 20 years, said deaf children had not traditionally been taught sign language in Hong Kong. Instead, they had been taught to communicate through lip reading and learning how to speak.

'Sign language is not used systematically in deaf schools and not all the teachers are trained in using sign language in deaf education,' Mr Yiu said.

'Educators believed that deaf children should learn spoken language as much as possible and hopefully that would help them integrate into society. There are some very successful cases where they can communicate very well with spoken language but still many of them cannot communicate effectively with others.'

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