Educating the deaf in Papua New Guinea

BY STEVEN WINDUO
EDUCATION NEWS PNG

WE HEAR LITTLE ABOUT the world of deaf and hard and hearing in Papua New Guinea.

In recent times I was contacted by an old friend and colleague, Steven Wawaf Labuan. I was thrilled with the contact after so many years.

Wawaf, as I had known him, was teaching linguistics as a tutor at the University of Papua New Guinea before he returned to the Morobe province.

The first thought I had was that Wawaf had completed a book of poems chronicling a bohemian life outside the corridors of high learning in the great grassland of Markham Valley.

That was possible, remembering Wawaf as that radical poet willing to recite nationalistic poems along side those street preachers at the crowded Boroko commercial center.

But not so, I would soon discover several emails later. Steven Wawaf Labuan is a different kind of poet altogether. He is someone who is more interested in working with teaching language to the deaf and hard of hearing children in the Markham Valley.

Equipped with his linguistic training at UPNG, Wawaf found himself involved with this important mission to teach the special group of children in Papua New Guinea.

He took the time to educate me on how he and others like Sylvia Yawingu of the Momase Regional Office for the Callan Services are doing to assist in the language development of this special group of Papua New Guineans.

Special Education agencies like the Callan Services and the National Department of Education Special Education Division have been working very hard to identify children with disabilities and aid their improvement before sending them off to mainstream schools where they join other normal children learn the same curriculum in the same class.

Children who are deaf are categorized in two groups: (1) those who were born totally without the hearing sense—that is those who are profoundly deaf, and (2) those who lost hearing sense some time after birth.

For those children who are born without hearing, normal child development processes for them are delayed for more than a thousand hours or so, so that what a normal child processes in an instant moment, a child without hearing processes several times later through exposure, or not at all, without exposure.

In developed countries such disabilities are quickly identified and treated right after birth compared to developing countries. In PNG identification and treatment are slow.

Usually, mothers of children who are deaf are the first to identify the disability and would normally treat it by communicating with their children through natural sign language and gestures. School age children with hearing difficulties are diagnosed and treated much later in their lives.

With the help of the Callan Services, the special education branch of the Catholic Church in Wewak significant number of children have been identified and assisted. Through their program on deaf units these special children are rehabilitated to comparable status as those with hearing senses.

The challenges the Callan Services have are many, but two important ones are the absence of a standard handbook of signs for the complete sign wordlist in PNG, especially in Tokpisin and the absence of a sign language dictionary based on the handbook of word signs.

Steven Wawaf and Sylvia Yawingu are pioneering innovative linguistic approaches to teaching and learning English as a second language for children who are deaf. Three methods used in special education programs are (1) the sound-vibration/feeling-detection device for language learning, (2) oral phonetics and speech production/acquisition, and (3) English comprehension through Trans-phonemic Bridge.

According to their report, Sylvia Yawingu and Wawaf Labuan have seen great success in their methods of teaching deaf and children with loss of hearing.

Further research and trial of the methods are currently in progress at the Callan Services Institute in Wewak. The innovative method of teaching and learning English by children who are deaf is an exciting development initiative.

The bridge for successful English comprehension suggested for children who are deaf is the trans-phonemic bridge approach that Sylvia and Steven Wawaf developed. Conclusive results before the end of the year will confirm and validate the methods developed by these Papua New Guineans in their mission to help a special group of our people.

I could not help but relate the PNG experience to the birth of the Nicaraguan Sign Language. In 1980s deaf children and adolescents in Nicaragua were brought together in schools. They created a new sign language as a result of the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

In their book How English Works, Anne Curzan and Michael Adams, explain that in “the 1980s the first schools for the deaf were opened in Managua, and adolescents from around the country were brought to the school.

Within a very short period of time, the teenagers were communicating with each other using a combination of the home signs that different students had brought with them, along with the signs they created. It was, from all reports, a signed pidgin.

The teachers, with very little training in the teaching of the Deaf, were using primarily signed Spanish with the students (despite the fact that the students had had no prior exposure to Spanish), which seems to have had little effect on the communicative system that they developed.”

The children in Nicaragua had given birth to a new language called Idioma de Signos Nicarguense or Nicaraguan Sign Language. The sign language shares grammatical features with other creoles and other sign languages even though the children did not have access to other languages.

In PNG we might also see a unique PNG sign language develop because of our multilingual communities interacting with each other alongside the use of English with Creolized pidgins and vernaculars. This sign language unique to PNG will depend on the kind of research and observations carried out at this time.

I have my hats off for Papua New Guineans like Steven Wawaf Labuan, Sylvia Yawingu and other hard working teachers and volunteers of special education programs for the deaf and hard of hearing children in Papua New Guinea.

Comments

[Michael]

So glad to find this article. I work with Buk bilong Pikinini in Port Moresby. I have been inspired by some of the work done by our librarians at the Hohola Red Cross Special school. Our head librarian Noah is profoundly deaf and the assistant is hearing with excellent AusLan skills. This issue needs to be higher on the agenda in PNG and the work that organisations like Callan do is impresive.

[Benjamin Zuvani]

I am not an expert in that field of deafness education but have been and am still working for Callan Services but currently on study leave (studying Medical Science at Flinders Uni with the intention of doing Post Graduate Optometry studies.

I work in the area of ear and eye health care and know that most of the causes of deafness/hearing impairment (and blindness/ visual impairment) in PNG are preventable or avoidable.

As for the education of the people (children) that are hearing impaired, the Melanesian Sign Language (a copy of the dictionary can be obtained from the NDOE Special Education Division) and AUSLAN are use interchangeably.

When communicating in sign languages, there are 'short cuts taken' with the grammar and would not be a full sentence as would be the case when one speaks in English or Tok Pisin.

Callan has been involved in these areas and the general area of disabilities for a while and has Special/Inclusive Education Resource Centers and sub centers in all but three provinces with its national unit at the St. Benedict's DWU Campus Wewak.

However, Callan, together with other such agencies and organisations, needs support from the wider community to make our society more inclusive.

Helen Admas Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968), an American who was both deaf and blind once said that her blindness separated her from things but her deafness separated her from people, when she was asked which of the two had the most disabling effect on her.

I feel such a separation when I am with people who speak other languages and go on and on whilst I sit silently beside them for minutes not knowing what they are saying (and if they were strangers, hoping that they were not planning something against me).

Thanks to both Dr Winduo and PNG Attitude for publishing the story.

[Peter Kranz]

And remarkably this brings us to Wittgenstein's 'private language argument'.

His point shows that the idea of a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent. A community of shared experiences must be involved.

So I believe this is the case for my cousin - and for deaf people everywhere.

So Wittgenstein meets PNG! Always knew it would happen [
ref: L. Wittgenstein 'Philosophical Investigations']

Go on and check it out - it's not that bad! Fact is it's the single most important work of the 20th C.

[Peter Kranz]

I should add that language is a shared experience. It is only through a community of deaf people that a shared signed language can develop.

Whether in the case of our cousin this was a local group, or a more widespread national PNG signed language amongst deaf people I do not know. She was in group 1 - has never had hearing.

Well done Steven for bringing this to our attention. It deserves further study.

(And I remember you walking around the campus barefoot as you said this gave you more of a village experience!)

[Peter Kranz]

We have a deaf cousin in PNG. We often had her around at our place with the relos and quickly learnt a sort of basic sign language to enable simple communication.

But she had a sign language of her own which we could not really understand. I think this was a PNG version of something equivalent to AUSLAN. But I could not work out whether it was a signed version of Pisin, or whether it was unique. I suspect the latter.

As deaf people in compeletly different cultures have the ability to develop a complex signed language of their own, I have no doubt that she was able to communicate subtle and complex ideas through her own language.

To attempt to explain this puts me in danger of being patronising.

She was a remarkable young woman.

"Deaf communities are very widespread in the world and the culture which comprises within them is very rich. Sometimes it even does not intersect with the culture of the local hearing population..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language