Sign language, more than a lifestyle, is a means of communication for children!

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If there is something that I would like to learn, it is sign language. While I was in my time of missions, I was always close to a young friend who socialized a lot with people and knew a little about sign language, as they say there defended and understood well. Years later we met again, and I found out that her desire to help people led her to study psychology, and today she became director of a school for children who needed special studies, in which she started as an educational psychologist.

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We are all born with a biological capacity to learn to speak according to the language that is around us. For this reason when a child is born deaf, that is to say with some damage in their auditory system, they can not develop a natural speech either. But the mechanism to learn a new language is there in your brain intact, like an empty CPU waiting to be filled with information. Just like our wonderful brain works. Then it is when nature and science manage them, they do not hear but they see perfectly, expressions, body postures and movements, it is there where language becomes a very important role in this valuable community.

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Let's take a tour of history and learn a little about this beautiful language.

Sign language, are natural languages ​​of gestural production and visual perception, which have perfectly defined grammatical structures.Unlike oral language communication is done through a vowel and auditory channel, sign language is by spatial sight and in tactical times in the case of people who have deafblindness, which allows the deaf, dumb to communicate with each other, and have a better family and social relationship.

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Even though the sign language system is used only in deaf people, the use of signs in communication is as old as oral language, or even more. In fact, it is believed that some tribes of North America used signs as a method of communication between different tribes that did not have the same language.

In the year 1620, Juan de Pablo Bonet, made a publication that was considered the first treaty of phonetics and speech therapy, which consisted of an oral teaching system for deaf people through the use of signs alphabetical. This is how the call (manual alphabet) that would improve communication between people who are deaf, mute and deaf and dumb is spread throughout Europe and then in the world.

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Here in Venezuela, it is good to know that this community has an organization called (LSV) Venezuelan Sign Language. At the University of the Andes -ULA and at the Pedagogical Institute of Caracas, scientific studies about the LSV and its community of users have been analyzed for more than a decade. These investigations were carried out at the request of the Ministry of Education as support for the bilingual education program (in LSV and in Spanish) that was implemented in 1985 in public schools for the deaf in the country. This program, which the Ministry of Education abandoned more than 10 years ago, allowed the LSV to begin to be used as a school language, and a positive effect was achieved in the preparation of the Deaf community itself. Over the years they have continued working, preparing students to be teachers and teachers who will be the first educators who will go out to teach sign language in schools and high schools in our country.