A Letter to Ms.Ho Koon Wei

Dear Ms.Ho,

I’m Sonia, a Year 1 Undergraduate Student from the School of Education. I’m grateful to meet and listen to your presentation. I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation the other day. This is my first time meeting and listening a Deaf lecturer giving a wonderful presentation on   “Learning and Living: A Deaf speaker. Your delivery was so engaging that I lost all track of time. I was so amazed to see your friend (the sign language translator) was translating very fast especially the way she uses her hand gestures and translating in sign language.  I was really impressed to see u and your friend (the sign language translator) being cooperative and communicate very professionally.

Before this, I didn’t have any understanding about how the language is learned and I didn’t know that without hearing it is almost impossible to learn to speak. I was also unclear about the term labeled as “Deaf and Dumb” and why does that “label” exist in the society, which to me it sounds horrible and it is very offensive. After hearing your presentation, I learnt a lot about deaf people lives and the differences between pre-lingual deafness and post-lingual deafness. Another thing that I would like to say, that before this I had this question on what language do deaf people used to communicate?. How do they think? I had the impression that they thought "with their hands," not with the feeling of hand movements (if I got that right). Your presentation on the language of Deaf had given me a clear picture that deaf communities make their own language and sign language, is their first language. When they master their own native sign language, they could easily learn other sign languages.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to learn a lot about deaf people lives. It is really an eye-opening experience for me.

 

Regards,

Sonia

Year 1 Undergraduate Student.