ASL popular language choice at private HS

From the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

With all the giggling, nodding, hand signals and broad gestures going on, it looked more like a game of charades than a class in session.

At the blackboard, the smiling, animated woman was obviously the teacher, but she never uttered a word.

Emilia Daquioag hardly needs to speak to teach American Sign Language at Saint Francis School. She is deaf, and speech is difficult for her, but Daquioag's facial expressions and body language are often enough to convey the key elements of a visual language.

Sister Joan of Arc Souza, school principal for 18 years, began offering sign language as a foreign language credit to satisfy high school and college requirements 10 years ago, she said. And the school is the only private school to do so.

Interest in French and Hawaiian language classes was tepid a decade ago, but when Souza offered ASL, the girls warmed to it immediately.

"It's different," Souza said. "That's why most of them want to take the class."

Tenth-graders Kali Piccoli-Wong and Anuhea Pohina and ninth-grader Harlee Meyers are avid signers.

"It's different from all other languages," said Pohina. "I don't know of any other school that offers it. It's also good in certain situations when you see a deaf person needing help."

Wealth Salvador, a ninth-grader, said she wanted to learn ASL to become an interpreter for the deaf.

"It's fun!" she added. "Sometimes you don't want to talk, so you can use sign language."

Taylor Mau, an 11th-grader, took ASL from Daquioag as a freshman and became proficient enough to become her teacher's interpreter at school functions, signing words to songs being sung, and translating what was said at assemblies.

"It was fun and easy to learn, but hard to remember - there are so many signs," Mau said. "And it's original, not like anything everyone else knows."

ASL often reverses the order of subjects, verbs and objects in sentence structure compared with standard English.

In halting speech, Daquioag said if her students become confused about her signing, they "help each other, and figure it out together," which is what she wants.

Mau and Salvador sometimes act as Daquioag's interpreters in the classroom for the rest of the students when spoken explanations are needed. They also help their teacher with grammar and English as she studies for a master's degree in deaf interpretive professional education.

With several ASL classes offered every weekday, there are enough students who are fluent that "we have to watch them during tests" in other subjects to make sure they don't signal the answers to one another, Souza observes lightly.

Pearl City High School and the School for the Deaf and Blind are the only other schools under the Department of Education to offer ASL as a foreign or world language credit, according to Lynette Fujimori, the DOE's World Language Education specialist.