Looking and Learning

British Sign Language (BSL) for people with acquired hearing loss

Week three of BSL and Sue’s not feeling so anxious or out of place. Not criticising tutor or classmates, it’s just that for some deaf people – more than hearing folk could imagine – entering a learning situation with 16 (hearing) strangers is extremely intimidating and isolating.

The majority of a group like that will communicate easily, listening to what the tutor is explaining and having a chat during playtime. The deaf pupil has to focus solely on the tutor’s mouth whilst ignoring the rest of the group and use break time not as a chance to get-to-know, but to rest a hard worked brain. Lipreading is tiring due to the intensity of translating lip movements into words, there’s no possibility of sitting back and letting things flow overhead for a lipreader. And that’s no different when a deaf partner is at home with family, so don’t feel peeved when the lipreader wants to withdraw from communiction and ‘tune out’, there’s no offence, just exhaustion.

Last week some students spoke with Sue during playtime, which pleased and alarmed her. The others don’t seem to have any deaf communication skills – why should they? They’re new to deaf requirements, so no complaints here. Deaf awareness used to be a part of this BSL course, but due to cutbacks and time restraints, no more. I’d have thought that for anyone learning BSL to communicate with deaf folk that awareness would be vital.

The tutor will be telling the group that signing is now the way to communicate with Sue, not as a ‘PC awareness’ but a way of helping everyone learn signing for communication – which is, after all, why they’re all there. For once the deaf person will have the advantage as the hearing students won’t be used to not hearing the words.