Teacher Performs Linguistic Gymnastics : Hands Fly as Immigrants Learn to Sign

Stuck in a corner of the West Valley Occupational Center is a classroom with little to distract the students from learning.

The carpet is close to threadbare and the walls are decorated for the most part with fake-wood wallpaper. The only bright colors in the room belong to the American flag.

Most of the students who attend language classes held six hours a day, five days a week here are immigrants. They are also deaf.

The students are learning American Sign Language as a third language and English as a fourth. Linguistic gymnastics are a necessity for the teacher, Sandra Dickinson, and her 40 or so students from 17 countries.

On a recent day, a Swedish woman appeared to be sharing a joke in sign language with an American classmate. Another American was signing to a Polish man who had been conversing with a Romanian. A young Ecuadorean woman was taking it all in.

‘Flying Hands’

Everyone was talking, but the room was quiet.

Speaking through an interpreter, Dickinson, who is deaf, said it is a classroom with “a lot of flying hands.”

Dickinson’s classroom is the place where deaf immigrants usually end up after they arrive in the San Fernando Valley. Deaf language instruction at West Valley, which is under auspices of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is free and the routine is flexible.

Students can attend as many months or years as they want. The average stay is one year and the students range in age from 18 to 70, though most are in their 20s. Once they grasp their new languages, they have a better chance of success at employment or occupational training.

Like many immigrants, they have come to America to better their lives. An international deaf grapevine of sorts brought them here.

“It was word of mouth,” said Aurel Junc, a carpenter in Romania for 30 years, in explaining why he and many of the 25 or so deaf Romanians came to live in a city they pronounce “LaLa.”

‘I Love It’

The same story was offered by Jan Rawecki, a 30-year-old Pole who immigrated four years ago. “Friends of mine told me they have very good schools in the San Fernando Valley,” he said. “I love it here.”

So how does the Pole understand the Syrian in the class? Or the Guatemalan comprehend the Israeli?

It is not as hard as it might seem, Dickinson said. Unlike spoken languages which can be vastly different, sign languages are to a certain degree universally conceptual and therefore share common characteristics.

For instance, in the United States and numerous other countries, the symbol for “man” is a finger brushed on a real or imaginary mustache. In many countries the sign for a woman is a touch of an imaginary earring, though in the United States it is a downward stroke of the cheek, connoting the string on a bonnet. In Mexico, it is a cupped hand at the breast.

To communicate with her multinational class, Dickinson uses individualized instruction, Apple computers, flashcards and even pantomime and charades.

During a recent school day, the charade exercise looked like a scene played out in many a living room on a Saturday night.

On the chalkboard were a series of “oo” words, such as coop, zoom, shoot and toot. The class was stuck on the word croon. So Dickinson became Bing Crosby. She leaned back, grabbed a microphone from the air and let an imaginary melody trip off her tongue.

Her performance was greeted with blank looks. Obviously, Bing Crosby in today’s age is no Michael Jackson. The teacher had better luck with “broom.”

Out of respect for the many nationalities represented in the classroom, a few words in American Sign Language had to be changed.

There is no American sign for Romania, so the class adopted Romania’s own sign, which conveys the country’s shape.

The Hungarians did not like the American sign for their country--the sign means starving--so that was changed. The American sign depicting Poland also was axed at the request of Polish students. The sign: a thumb flicking the nose in an outward motion.

A 29-year-old from Romania offered one reason why the linguistic goulash they dish out to one another every day does not turn into alphabet soup.

“We have to be friends to communicate,” explained Mihai Marin, who came to the United States via a refugee camp in Italy. He first lived in Washington, D.C., but grew lonely and moved to Van Nuys when he heard that deaf Romanians were living there.

When all else fails, Marin has a way of coping with foreign words and signs. “If I don’t understand something, I nod and smile.”