SIGN LANGUAGE: LEARNING TO SIGN IS LIKE TAKING A COURSE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

At one time, sign language was only considered a way to communicate with and between the deaf. For some people today, however, learning to sign is like taking a course in a foreign language.

Linda Hurt, who teaches sign language at the Cape Girardeau Vocational School, said people enroll in the class not out of a need to learn to sign, but out of desire to learn.

"It is a beautiful language and I think more people are aware of it now," Hurt said. "Years ago when people used manual communication it was thought to be really strange. Feelings toward manual communication have changed tremendously."

Hurt's class is an eight-week course that meets Monday nights. She has taught the class, which ranges in size from 15 to 20 students, for 13 years.

"I think it would be wonderful if schools would offer it as an elective just like Spanish of French," Hurt said.

The version she teaches is Sign Exact English, which originated in the 1970s. It is distinctly different from the older and more well known American Sign Language. There is no official, universal sign language.

While signals in ASL may represent entire concepts, SEE is an exact, word-for-word manual translation of English. For example, while there is only one sign in ASL for afraid, scared and frightened, there are separate signs for those words in SEE.

SEE helps "teach a child the English language, teach sentence structure and the syntax of the English language," Hurt said. ASL, on the other hand, allows for much quicker and efficient translation. It is also the version most commonly sanctioned by the deaf community.

"ASL is a beautiful way to communicate and will always be around and deserves to be," Hurt said. "It is a good way of communicating."

Few processes rely on direct communication as greatly as that of teaching, and with the rise of mainstreaming hearing-impaired students into standard public schools, there is an increasing need for teachers and students to be versed in sign language.

At Meadow Heights Elementary School in Patton, kindergarteners are learning to sign to communicate with one of their classmates, Sara, who is hearing-impaired.

While Sara can hear some sounds, she can't understand enough to effectively communicate. Her classmates, however, are picking up quickly on manual communication.

"They're faster than I am," said Linda Ingram, Sara's kindergarten teacher. "They really enjoy it."

Ingram and Kathy McMillan, Sara's interpreter, spend time daily working with the children to help them learn. With a word here and a concept there, things are going smoothly. For grandparents' day, the children learned to sign a counting song.

"We try to include signing into lessons whenever we can," Ingram said.

Theoretically, the kindergarten class at Meadow Heights will be together in school for the next 12 years. Through the upcoming years, they will learn more and more concerning communicating by sign.

"The goal of what we have started is as Sara learns more, they learn more and eventually they will communicate fairly well with her," Ingram said.