Meaning condensation is a process of summarising long statements (Kvale & Brinkmann 2009:205). After completion of the transcription process, each transcribed interview was read. The researcher then obtained a sense of what each participant was saying. The researcher used the most used themes, that is, the main themes in the transcribed text, and rephrased them into easy-to- understand text. The themes were applied to the purpose of the study.
1.26 Conclusion
The research was based on teachers’ teaching in deaf schools. The teachers observed in their classes when they taught the deaf learners. The researcher
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noted that there were many sign language challenges in language policy and planning in South Africa. According to Penn (1993:12), sign language is a real language, which should be equal in status to all other languages, meaning that deaf learners’ rights can be protected through appropriate language policy and planning.
The researcher looked into how the teachers developed equivalent terminology for English concepts when they were teaching. There is no specific curriculum for the deaf, unlike the case in other countries, such as the United States. The research also established whether, and how teachers used the official Western Cape Education Department curriculum, and whether this curriculum informed what was actually being taught and learned in the classroom.
The researcher wanted to research how teachers came up with innovative ways to support deaf learners, while at the same time assessing to what extent teachers adhered to the official curriculum. There is often a lack of awareness in schools regarding corpus planning and the ongoing development of dictionaries. For this reason, the researcher shared this information about the dictionaries with the teachers, the deaf teacher assistants, and the learners.
The deaf learners were observed and interviewed about their feelings concerning the use of sign language in their classes and their input formed a valuable part of this research. The learners were also asked what ways they thought would help to make sign language teaching more competitive and successful in their classrooms.
The chapter mentioned the problems identified by the researcher, such as deaf learners’ rights not being protected through the appropriate language policy and planning in the same way that the rights of speakers of the 11 official languages
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are entrenched in the Constitution. Deaf learners are a marginalised minority group when it comes to formal education.
The general goal of this research was to find out what is happening on the ground in selected Western Cape schools and to come up with ways in which the use of sign language can become entrenched as a human right. This point has been made by scholars such as Schneider and Priestly (2006), who argue that if deaf children are not exposed to sign language, it amounts to an infringement of their human right to language usage.
In Chapter 2, the researcher will discuss the history of sign language in South Africa. The meaning of South African Sign Language (SASL) will be discussed, as well as the nature of sign language, its status and its users. Further to this, illiteracy among deaf people, ways of viewing deafness, deaf culture, SASL and language-in-education policy will be researched. The educational implications, why sign language is not used as a twelfth official language in South Africa, SASL as a medium of instruction, the establishment of more deaf schools in South Africa, and the failure of deaf education, among other topics will be explored later in this research.
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Chapter 2
The History of Sign Language in South Africa 2.1 Introduction
The meaning of South African Sign Language (SASL)
According to Penn (1993:12), sign language is a real language, which should be equal in status to all other languages. Deaf people can sign any topics, concrete or abstract. The deaf do not live apart from hearing people, and they need to communicate with hearing people in order to function socially and economically (Ricento 2006:331). There are two different ways to view deafness. Penn, et al. (1993b) argue that “deafness is essentially a medical condition, characterised by an auditory deficit”, that is, deaf people are people who cannot hear.
Deaf people are not only different from hearing people; they are inferior to hearing people, at least in a physiological sense. Looking at the South African context, some scholars have entrenched the view of deaf learners being a minority group. Bugelmann (1992), Graves (1994), Archard and Niemeier (2004), and Dirven (2001), as well as Robinson and Ellis (2006) argue that sign language and deaf issues are only minor subjects in academia because deaf people are a small minority. Penn (1993b) claims that during the time of apartheid language planning and policymaking “SASL had its documented origins in residential schools for the deaf.” Before that time, some form of sign language existed within groups of deaf people. The Deaf Federation of South Africa (DEAFSA) (2006) asserts that SASL is a visual language, that it was developed naturally, and that deaf people have used SASL for centuries to communicate, in spite of the history of oppression of SASL by the wider society. DEAFSA (2006) contends that SASL will continue to exist for many
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centuries to come, saying, “As long as there are deaf people, there will be sign language”.
Sign language is a fully-fledged natural language, which is developed through use by a community of users, that is, deaf people. SASL has its own grammatical rules, that is, syntax. It is a true language. It can express the entire range of human experience (DEAFSA 2006). Sign language is not universal. According to Akach and Morgan (1997), SASL can be defined as “a visual- gestural language that has been created and is used by deaf South Africans to communicate with one another”. Aarons and Akach (1998) argue that “SASL is a language that allows the deaf child access to everything that any other child has access to”.