This story is interesting on its own. But it might be worthwhile to consider how this might reflect on long-ingrained attitudes, such as those toward Chinese characters vs. romanization.

In a sunlit classroom, down a dusty hutong in Tianjin, China’s third largest city, a lively argument is raging. Eight-year-old Zhang Licheng and six-year-old Zhao Anrong are debating who would make the better teacher….

It’s a scene familiar in any school anywhere, except that both these children are deaf and are communicating entirely in Chinese sign language.

What makes this unique is that for the past 50 years, sign language has been actively discouraged, and in some cases banned, from classrooms in China. Despite evidence showing that deaf children are visual learners, and that those who learn sign language perform better in school, educators have insisted they learn to speak so they can blend in with their hearing classmates at public school.

Since the 1980s, nearly 1,500 pre-school “hearing rehabilitation” centers, run by the quasi-governmental China Disabled People’s Federation (CDPF), have fuelled many a parent’s dream that hours spent mimicking words will eventually unlock their child’s linguistic talent, and release the family from the shadow of disability.

Yet, according to statistics compiled by the CDPF, fewer than 10 percent of China’s 800,000 deaf preschoolers will reach the age of compulsory education – seven years old – with an adequate grasp of the spoken language to join a public school.

Those who do benefit from the oral-only approach, and there are some success stories, are usually children with residual hearing, or who lost their hearing after they learned how to speak, or who can afford cochlear operations and special language training.

“It’s so difficult for the children to learn to speak,” says Hu Aixin, who has been teaching deaf children at Tianjin Number One School for the Deaf for the past 20 years.

“They need 45 minutes just to learn one syllable. For vowel sounds, it is easier – they can see the shape of the mouth. But for the sounds they can’t see – each shape can have different meanings depending on the tone. It takes a lot of time.”

Hu says that up to 70 percent of lesson time is spent teaching children how to say basic words such as mother and father. Math, science, literature and even playtime all take a back seat to oral drills. It means, she says, that children are missing out, not only on a quality education, but also on crucial life and communication skills.

As a result, most deaf children are expected to leave school with an education level at least three grades below their hearing peers, and with few job prospects beyond factory work.

“It’s not that deaf children aren’t as smart as the hearing students, they’ve just never been given a chance,” Hu says.

That this oral-only policy has contributed to the creation of a poorly educated and marginalized community of some 22 million people seems to have escaped the attention of the government – until now.

Over the past few years, local authorities in Tianjin City, and Jiangsu, Yunnan and Anhui provinces, in cooperation with groups such as UNICEF, Save the Children UK and the Amity Foundation, have been charting a new course for deaf education.

Using what is called in the West the bilingual and bicultural – or bi-bi – method, children gain a language they can communicate fluently in while also being given lessons in deaf culture and an identity they can be proud of.

Four years ago, Tianjin Number One School for the Deaf eschewed the oral-only method and adopted sign language as the main method of communication, employing deaf teachers to teach the language and culture of the deaf – both radical departures from the norm.

At first, the new approach was limited to just two preschool classes, but in September 2004, Zhao and Zhang joined a handful of deaf children in the country’s first bi-bi primary school class….

News of the experimental class is spreading. Deaf schools across the country are asking for more information and training in the approach. Local TV and media have run stories about the children, and in January the Hong Kong education ministry paid a working visit.

Yet, with such tangible and notable results, why is it that only a handful – just 33 children – have enrolled in the bi-bi class at Tianjin Number One School for the Deaf in the past four years?

Parents are the program’s biggest resource, say school officials, but also its biggest obstacle.

“Parents’ attitudes are hard to change,” says Professor Zhao Mingzhi, an ear, nose and throat doctor and director of the Tianjin Rehabilitation Centre for Hearing Disability. “Many still believe that sign language is a bad influence. Their only hope is that their child will be able to speak.”

For the profoundly deaf, he says, the oral-only approach “is unfair.” They may be able to utter a few basic words, but this is not true communication. “It is just for the parents. They convince themselves that because their child can say a few lines of a Tsang Dynasty poem that they can communicate,” he says.

People also convince themselves that because children memorize some poems in Classical Chinese and are taught what they mean, the children can read Classical Chinese, which is not at all the case.

When I was in junior high, the members of a high school German club visited one of my classes and taught us a German song. We learned to pronounce the words (i.e. mimic our teachers) and were taught the song’s meaning. But no one would conclude from this that we knew German.

Many parents spend tens of thousands of yuan on Chinese medicine, acupuncture, rehabilitation centers and hearing aids. The upshot is that when all options are exhausted and their child still can’t hear or speak, they may finally turn to sign language; but at that stage, children are well past the optimum time for language development, professor Zhao says.

source: Seen and not heard. The Standard of Hong Kong, February 26-27, 2005.