About Us

Rationale of Project

With the concern of the international community for the development of education in regard to people with disabilities, a growing number of nations and regions are acknowledging the need for hearing-impaired students to learn sign language, and taking steps to encourage them to learn through the medium of sign language. Since the signing of the United Nations: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by China in 2008, the Convention has become applicable to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. In addition to recognizing the equal status of sign language to the spoken language of hearing people, the Convention stipulates the right of hearing-impaired people to learn and use sign language. It also stipulates that service agencies and organizations have the obligation to provide an environment for the use of sign language and to promote its development. Therefore, the school is duty-bound to shoulder the responsibility for the establishment of a set of tools for the systematic learning of sign language by all the hearing-impaired students in Hong Kong, so that through using sign language their learning efficiency may be enhanced, and that at the same time, hearing people, especially the classmates, parents and teachers of hearing-impaired students, may be induced to recognize the needs of hearing-impaired students and the needs for strengthening communication and exchanges with them, and for working with them in creating an equalitarian and integrated society.

There is a lack of a unified sign vocabulary in Hong Kong at the present moment. As the majority of sign vocabulary in use have been created by different hearing-impaired groups, a particular sign vocabulary item may be signed in five or six ways, and the vocabulary items are mainly about events in daily life. As a result, there is a lack of specialized sign vocabulary for educational use, particularly in meeting the needs of teaching academic subjects such as Science, Liberal Studies, and etc. Sign language does not have the vocabulary to express the specialized terms in these subjects, creating serious impediments for learning and teaching them by hearing-impaired students and their teachers.

For this reason, the school made an application to the Quality Education Fund for funding to implement a three-year project (February 2012 through January 2015) "The Development of New Sign Language Vocabulary for Special Education Needs for NSS Curriculum", briefly referred to as the Sign-Assisted Instruction Programme, to actively promote the development of sign language teaching. The goals of the programme are to create a sign language video dictionary for the purposes of integrating the different signs in use on campus and to create signs for the vocabularies of the academic subjects.

The Project

• The staff of the school to espouse the mode of teaching whereby speech and sign language are used concurrently in the classroom;
• To establish a sign language teaching resource centre;
• To Integrate sign vocabularies commonly used to help hearing-impaired students to establish a common language systematically so as to improve their ability to communicate and enhance learning effectiveness;
• To develop the sign language vocabulary needed for teaching various subjects in the school so as to help students understand the subject matter taught and to consolidate their learning;
• To train and upgrade the sign language proficiency of teaching staff so as to enhance the effectiveness of teaching;
• To promote an atmosphere for learning sign language on campus;
• To give support to family members of hearing-impaired students in learning sign language; and
• To provide channels of learning sign language for hearing-impaired students and special needs teaching staff in mainstream schools in support of teaching and learning.

Committees

Principles of Signing

There are old forms and new forms for some basic signs. Take for instance the sign for 'north'. In the old form the little finger is extended while in the new form it is not. As the hand shape for the new form is similar to the shape of the Chinese character 'north', the school adopts the new form for 'north'.

Old form

New form

Some signs are changed as hearing-impaired people them by sight. The sign for Tuen Mum was originally formed by the hands taking the shape of the Chinese character for 'Tuen' and signing 'door'. Later it was changed to both hand signing 'k’ and 'door'. As the latter is a corruption, the school adopts the original sign that looks like the Chinese character Tuen and the sign for 'door'.

「Originally formed by the hands taking the shape of the Chinese character for 'Tuen' and signing 'door'.

「It was changed to both hand signing 'k’ and 'door'.

Errors stem from losing track of the origins of certain signs. The sign for 'Jordan' was originally derived from mimicking a double-decker ferry at the Jordan Road Ferry Pier, but later it was mistakenly understood as deriving from the sign for the former American basketball star Michael Jordan. As the latter is a case of misunderstanding, the school opts for the original sign that mimics a double-decker ferry at the Jordan Road Pier.

The sign for 'Jordan' was originally derived from mimicking a double-decker ferry at the Jordan Road Ferry Pier.

It was mistakenly understood as deriving from the sign for the former American basketball star Michael Jordan.

Some signs have overseas origins as they have been directly adopted from signs in other places. As local hearing-impaired communities did not want to sign the American president Barack Obama awkwardly as 'Olympics + bus + horse', they have adopted the sign used by the hearing-impaired people in the United States instead. As a result the school adopts the sign commonly used by local hearing-impaired communities as well.

The Principles of Creating New Sign Vocabulary

To take an example, the letter M has been used to stand for MacDonald's, not because the name of the store begins with an M, but because M is the store's logo. Another example is Kentucky Fried Chicken, abbreviated as KFC, but KFC has not been adopted to stand for the store because KFC was not the logo when the store first opened for business in Hong Kong. Instead, an image of Colonel Sanders was the logo so local hearing-impaired communities have been using the sign for 'beard' to stand for the store.

An example is the sign for the first black president, Barack Obama, of the United States mentioned earlier. Other examples abound, in the instances of the names of countries and places such as China, Beijing, Taiwan, Taipei, etc. and certain specific people and events in the Chinese Mainland such as the Central Government and the Shanghai World Expo. As there are already well-established signs used by the local governments or hearing-impaired communities in those places, the native signs are directly borrowed.

The aforementioned sign 'Jordan' mimics a double-decker vehicular ferry at the Jordan Road Ferry Pier.

In a sign such as ''Tseung Kwan O' , which is made up of 'general' and 'O', 'general' is a paraphrase.

In a sign such as ''Tseung Kwan O' , which is made up of 'general' and 'O', 'O' is a transliteration.

Note: The above principles are based on the formulations of the Working Group on the Creation of New Sign Language Vocabulary established in 2010 under the Service Network for Hearing-Impaired People of the Hong Kong Joint Council of Social Services.