Don’t silence sign language: call for dying medium to be revived and used as teaching tool for deaf in Hong Kong
- Some 155,000 people in city have hearing disabilities, but only about 5 per cent of them know sign language, which has been sidelined in education
- Experts argue medium can be used in various therapies and improve learning abilities of deaf or hearing-impaired students
Aaron Wong Yiu-leung, 33, who was born deaf, has lived in a silent world all his life.
At 18, he dropped out of vocational school. Although he is proficient in sign language, having learned it from his parents who are also deaf, it was rarely used in classrooms, and he just could not keep up with his peers as he struggled with lip-reading his teachers.
For the next seven years, Wong worked odd jobs in restaurants and garages.
“I thought: ‘This is it. This is the best I can do for the rest of my life’,” he says in an interview through sign language with the help of interpreters Kim Wu Lake-yan and Ham Chu Man-him.
Some 155,000 people in Hong Kong have hearing disabilities, but only about 5 per cent of them know sign language, according to linguistics expert Professor Gladys Tang Wai-lan.
This is partly because the use of sign language is not encouraged in Hong Kong’s education system.