Learning Sign, Awful Teacher...

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kipourgos

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I mean Learning Sign of course...but can't change the header now. :p

Are there any ASL teachers here? I need a bit of advice.

After waiting for months for an opening, I finally got a place in a Turkish Sign Language class (I live in Istanbul). The teacher is a native speaker of TSL, a hearing son of deaf parents. He is really enthusiastic about teaching, a great guy, and unfortunately he is clueless about teaching techniques.

Every class is the same. Teacher stands in front of the class, shows us signs as he says the words, jumps from topic to topic, no conversation, no practice other than just mimicking him as he tells us signs and how to make them. One day I asked him, "when are we going to actually use it, to practice with each other?" I was thinking of things like drills, role play, all sorts of things we could do. He said "but you can't do that until you have the signs." He has this idea that sign language is "different" from "normal" speech and you can't teach it like you would teach an oral foreign language. So while we all have lots of signs now and can put together some basic strings, there is absolutely *zero* practice in actually seeing sign, learning to recognize sentences, because he doesn't sign to us. I come in, sign "how are you" and he answers back "fine, how are you?" orally! When we learned numbers, he had us sign them, I said "how about if you sign them and we try and recognize them?" Nah...

It's not as if there is a lot of teacher training here and he just is a bad one - it's the same for the majority of foreign language teaching in this country.

The one good thing is that the classes are held in a Deaf/Hearing Impaired Association and there are lots of people who hang out there in the evenings. They are *very* helpful and love to talk; and forgiving of mistakes (like when I accidentally said I was 500 years old...). :) What's strange is that none of the other students seem to have considered doing this. The Deaf people sit together on one side of the patio and the hearing students on the other side in their own groups.

Okay..venting here...my question for ASL teachers is - I want to talk with him one-on-one about this, and do it in a non-confrontational and constructive way. If you were me, how would you approach him, if you were going to give just one or two suggestions, what would they be? I know what mine would be but I'm interested in your opinions.
 
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I am not a teacher but it sounds like you are in Level 1 which can seem boring and repetitive. Your teacher is correct in saying that you cannot run until you learn to walk (so to speak) and learning the signs and how to make them is a step.

Kudos to you for being brave and taking that important step to interact.
Perhaps the other hearing students are just intimidated and shy about jumping in. Hopefully they will follow your lead.

I would say, go for it, talk to your teacher and ask when he will be doing some small sentence structure drills. You may find out that he has to follow a established lesson plan or he may just be a poorly equipt teacher as you suspect.
 
No, he doesn't have to stick to any particular course, he wrote the course book!

Anyway, we did talk today; I forgot to mention that we have become friends so the channels are fairly open. Yes of course we have to learn some basics, but when we learn the basics, it's much easier to assimilate them if we actually use them and practice them, that was my point. After all we are making sentences like "I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you said last night," and "The last bus left at 8, and I missed it," so practicing "hi, how are you - fine, how are you?" isn't too advanced for us. ;)

I kept it away from the personal so there were no hurt feelings, and talked a little about language teaching in Turkey in general and how almost all education here is oriented toward passing tests. I gave him the example of one girl in the class who has had several years of English in school, knows lots of words, and can't understand even a basic English sentence spoken clearly and slowly. Because nobody has actually spoken in English to her. It's the way it's usually done here, so it's normal that people learn to teach that way.

He said "If you were teaching me English, first you'd teach me words, then you'd teach me grammar, and then I could start talking." I told him "No, that's the way English is taught in schools here, and it's why people can't speak English. If I taught you English, I'd have you using what you learned immediately so you would learn to hear it and use it, and we'd add more as we went." He really seemed surprised by that idea.

So what I'm going to do is give him a couple English lessons. :) With conversation, some simple greetings, to show him that although some of the sounds (and word order!) are very different from Turkish, it doesn't mean he couldn't do it, or needed to wait a month before he could learn to hear the sounds. And in class, he went as far as to sign some things without talking and let us recognize them. A few times people had trouble, but then they got better at it. So all in all it was a pretty productive day. :)

As for the other students - yes, they are a little shy, but the reason is that they have been brought up in this teaching system here, which hasn't changed since 1925, in which the important thing is to get the "right answer" and pass the test. So they are terrified of making a mistake. It's the biggest difficulty that native English teachers have here - getting the students to use the language in class and let go of the "but I might flub it" mentality.
 
It sounds like you have good communication going on and a good head on your shoulders :)

You just might end up being credited with an improved method of learning in Turkey :)

Keep going!! Stay Focused!! :)
 
Mod's Note: The word "sing" have been changed to "sign" on this title thread is fixed. :)
 
Well, I have a *lot* to learn before that, but it crossed my mind. What I'd really like to do is learn Turkish sign well, then perhaps collaborate on a good book on the subject. Right now it just doesn't exist; there are a couple collections of signs but very little about grammar, sentence structure etc.

One good development - there was a new class of complete beginners, and instead of just telling them signs, he turned off the voice for a bit and made the signs, letting them recognize them alone. He had thought that it would be "too hard," but they did great of course. Almost all of us have waited months to get into a class, there is such a lack of teachers here, so we're all really into it.
 
Kipourgos, I am very happy that you are anxious to learn Turkish sign language. You are doing good with what you know about the basic of sign words and to try to make them into the sentences. I wish I could have been there to observe what is happening in the classroom for hearing people and some deaf people who want to learn sign language. If the teacher don't want you to jump ahead to behind other students, then I guess you need to wait to really be patient until they have caught up with you. I know it is not easy because I have been through when I learned to sign Sign Exact English many years ago and I want to get ahead because I am very good in signs. So I need to wait for them to catch up with me like go with the flow. Just stay in and don't quit. You are doing just fine with what you are doing there. :thumb: :hug:
 
Bebonang said:
Kipourgos, I am very happy that you are anxious to learn Turkish sign language. You are doing good with what you know about the basic of sign words and to try to make them into the sentences. I wish I could have been there to observe what is happening in the classroom for hearing people and some deaf people who want to learn sign language. If the teacher don't want you to jump ahead to behind other students, then I guess you need to wait to really be patient until they have caught up with you. I know it is not easy because I have been through when I learned to sign Sign Exact English many years ago and I want to get ahead because I am very good in signs. So I need to wait for them to catch up with me like go with the flow. Just stay in and don't quit. You are doing just fine with what you are doing there. :thumb: :hug:
Click to expand...

Thanks for the encouragement. The teacher has no problem with me jumping ahead outside of class, and he's trying new things as well. Our talk was not an "accusing" sort of thing; I tried to make him aware of other appraoches. He's taken the ball and run with it, and told me the other day that he's going to try some games that he uses with deaf kids he teaches on the hearing people's TSL class.

Now I'm spending a couple days a week (besides class days) there just hanging out talking with folks (or trying to). I'm starting to feel that this is possible. :) Not that I thought it wasn't; but I felt so frustrated sitting and watching people signing, sometimes hearing them speak/mouth words I knew but unable to recognize the signs I knew because they change form in different contexts. But that's part of the fascination of it. Now the language geek in me wants to take an intensive ASL class when I'm back in the US this fall, just to be able to compare the different mechanisms. (And also because people keep asking me how a sign is in ASL and my knowledge of it is so little and rusty that I always have to say I don't know!)
 
BTW my teacher and some colleagues have been working for a long time on a TSL web site that should be up in a few weeks. I might be adding English to it as well. I'll post it when it comes up.
 
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