Sign Language: Discrimination In The Deaf Community

Imagine living somewhere where everyone can understand each other without saying anything. Where people fully paying attention to one another and actions are more valuable than words? Sign language contends to be the first form of communication of mankind, then it has evolved into spoken and auditory language. Sign language originated in France and diffuse to the United States. By mid-1800s, Laurent Clerc, a French teacher for the deaf people and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet created American Sign Language together. As the world developed, not as many people are aware of sign language and the positive impacts that it brings. Sign language helps deaf and non-deaf develop language, cognitive, and social-emotional. However, most people do not have

According to a new survey from Total Jobs, 1 in 4 deaf people have been forced quit their jobs because of discrimination in the workplace. Deaf people does not always have a translator to help communicate. Teaching sign language will bring awareness to deaf culture. Improving access to education and vocational rehabilitation services, and raising awareness especially among employers about the needs of people with hearing loss, will decrease unemployment rates for people with hearing loss (WHO, 2018). People will works towards promoting and advancing human rights of deaf people. It can help to bolster communication between the students, and prevent mainstreamed deaf students from feeling isolated at their schools. It brings awareness to the deaf culture throughout the community. It also helps the students to learn a foreign language, to become

Tracey Wong Briggs quoted, “she acknowledges that the idea of ASL as a foreign language is controversial, because it's not "foreign" and doesn't have a written form. But "it absolutely meets the standard of a language"--it has its own symbols and grammar, syntax, irregularities and culture, and it evolves with time” While the sentence seems convoluted to most people who can hear, it makes sense to Joe Lellman, an NIU senior from Buffalo Grove. He uses the sentence to show how different American Sign Language grammar is compared with spoken English. Lellman is considered legally deaf, but with a hearing aid, he can hear about two-thirds as well as the average hearing person. He was taught in a deaf school until third grade, when he entered regular public school. Though he continues to think in American Sign Language, he lost many of his signing skills and is now relearning much of the language at NIU — and embracing a part of himself that was lost.