On ( 19/2/2013), we had a special, talented, admirable guest speaker on our first day of second semester. She is a deaf person whom have succeed in her career and educational life. she is named as Miss Ho Koon Wei. she talked to us about the types and classifications of hearing loss, causes of hearing loss, impact of hearing loss, language of the deaf, learning a second spoken/written language and factors that effect the learning process.
she explained to us that hearing is not a disability where previously i thought that a deaf person is a person with disability. she said that society treat them as a person whom are disable which she declared that it is not true. She also claims that the deaf person are people who cannot hear whereas people who can hear are hearing people. Thus, the fact is she cannot hear and we can hear. That's the only difference between deaf people and hearing people in the society. She also said that they can lead a normal life as other people does such as can study, go outing, married, have kids and etc.
I also learned that there are many types of deaf which are conductive hearing loss, sensory-neural hearing loss and mixed hearing loss. To make this terms simple, there are deaf people and hard hearing people.
I get to know that deaf people's language such as visual language and a language that created by deaf people and use it among themselves. There are two main sign languages which are ASL ( American sign language) and BMI ( Bahasa isyarat Malaysia). BMI is a sign language that only used in Malaysia's deaf communities. More importantly, i learned that Deaf people do not sign the whole sentence when they need to say something. This is because some verbs and grammars does not carry any meanings in their conversation and sign language. For example, we hearing people will say "I am going to the shop" whereas Deaf people will sign" I go shop". In their sign language, present continuous tense, past tense and etc doesn't gives any meaning. Their main aim is to sign what they are going to do and going to say. They do not concentrate on grammar errors. That is Deaf people's language. I also learned that for A Deaf child, family support is very important.
From the article titled "learning about hearing people in the land of Deaf: an ethnographic account" by G.Audrei , I get to know that ASL is very important to communicate with Deaf people. Moreover, hearing people has the compulsory of learning ASL instead of speaking English to hearing people. However, even ASL proficient hearing people rely more on speech reading during their communication with ASL users. G.Audrei stated that ASL is very important in interaction with Deaf society and culture, hearing people's language use and attitudes about its use are important indicators of social identity.
