■A visit to bilingual Deaf education facilities in Northern Europe

In August, I had an opportunity to see bilingual Deaf education in three countries in North Europe: Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

In Denmark, from August 1982 to June 1992, a project of bilingual Deaf education was introduced in a Deaf children’s class. In Sweden, bilingual Deaf education for deaf children was firmly established by the Swedish Government Bill* adopted in 1981.

This year, in 2006, they celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Swedish Government Bill at Manila School for the Deaf, a pioneer in bilingual Deaf education school in Stockholm.

Unlike Japan where some people still insist seriously that Bilingual (Deaf education) means Japanese sign language and manually-coded Japanese, in Northern Europe, they understand that the first language for Deaf children is sign language that they can naturally acquire without special efforts as their mother tongue, and that the second language is the written language.

In all schools for the Deaf we visited, teachers recognize that simultaneous communication (Sim-Com) causes unnecessary confusion to deaf children and brings no benefit. They seem to understand the real meaning of “Sign Language is a Language.”

Those children who went through the bilingual education that started in 1982 have now grown up and we fortunately we had a chance to talk with some of them. They say they are fluent not only in Danish sign language, but also in reading and writing Danish. In addition they can read and write English. It is also no problem to read German and Swedish. (Some people say you can’t be called bilingual even if you can read and write Swedish and Danish, because they are very similar. But if you can't read Danish, you can't read Swedish either. If you can read and write Danish and can sign Danish sign language, you are already bilingual enough.)

Deaf educators in North Europe understand the importance of sign language as a mother tongue. The success of bilingual education depends on how much importance is put on sign language as the first language.

In the late 1990s, a program for providing babies and infants with cochlear implants started in earnest. Until a few years ago, educators in North Europe were optimistic about the babies and infants in North Europe and said they should not be excluded from bilingual Deaf education. They still considered them as deaf babies and infants after having cochlear implants and so thought they should be provided with a sign language environment in order to be able to acquire not only reading and writing abilities but also letting them have access to speaking abilities.

But we found drastic changes on this visit. In Denmark, almost 100 percent of deaf babies and infants have cochlear implants. Doctors give advice not to choose bilingual Deaf education and not to learn sign language as the first language in order to obtain the best results from the cochlear implants (CI). Parents agree with the advice and are actively choosing cochlear implants. (As a result, the number of the children in the Deaf school is decreasing rapidly.)

The fact is, with the advancement of technology in CI, people have become impatient in giving children with CI the opportunities to acquire sign language as their first language and then adding spoken language (listening and speaking) afterwards.

In other words, the more prevalent cochlear implants become, the less necessary sign language becomes.

I got the impression that the children with CI in schools for the Deaf in North Europe tended to be quiet. Their pronunciation may be as clear as hearing people, but it seemed that children with CI generally had a lower sign language ability. I was worried that many children with CI were not lively and their eyes didn't focus.

How about in Japan? There is plenty of information about bilingual Deaf education from North Europe, but no Japanese school has begun “real” bilingual education. They say, teachers in schools for the Deaf use “sign language”, but the “sign language” the teachers use in schools for the Deaf is Sim-Com . Additionally, most of them have the idea that sign language is only the instrument to learn Japanese.

I believe that we will be facing children with CI in future without much experience in bilingual education and CI will be accepted naturally. It is because Japanese Deaf education still draws on the idea of oralism (the theory of teaching hearing-impaired or deaf persons to communicate by means of spoken language).

Bilingual Deaf educators in North Europe muttered regretfully about the situation in Japan, “Time has gone backward.”

Since the 1990s Japanese educators and researchers have been to North Europe over and over again. But there is no “effort for change” in Japan. Only Deaf free schools are trying hard to realize the true bilingual education.

I would like to observe carefully how they deal with and what strategies they use vis-à-vis CI in further advancing bilingual Deaf education in North Europe. I do hope that bilingual Deaf education in Japan will be established within the public education system (under the responsibility of the government or with strong governmental support), not only in free schools, as soon as possible.

*Swedish Government Bill (adopted in 1981)
“The Government Commission on Integration points out that the profoundly deaf have to be bilingual to function among themselves and in society. Bilingualism on their part, according to the commission, means that they have to be fluent in their visual/gestural sign language, and in the language that society surrounds them with, Swedish.” (quoted from “JAPANESE DEAF NEWS”)

*Translated from the e-magazine of Sept. 11, 2006 (# 077)