In rebuttal to Nathaniel Pagan’s letter (“Foreign language must be foreign,” March 30, pg. 9), I am a profoundly deaf junior in the College of Arts and Sciences and I never learned as far as the alphabet in American Sign Language because I grew up in a society in which I never needed to use it.

I grew up using a speech therapist until I graduated high school in 2000, which means I learned how to speak the English language and its funny quirks in a span of 19 years. Four years after I graduated, I am still learning how to speak the language, having people correct me if I slip up on a word, occasionally stopping to think about a word and making sure that the person understood me before continuing the conversation.

As for the ASL issue, most of Boston’s major institutions, including Northeastern University, accept ASL as a foreign language. ASL to a person like me is definitely a foreign language in itself; it has its own grammar context and its own way of saying certain words. If not ASL, the other option, Signed English, could be more acceptable as a foreign language.

Sign Language has its own forms around the world. British Sign Language is different from Signed English and ASL. So is the Spanish version, the German version, the Brazilian version and so on. The point is, American Sign Language and English are just a part of the culture we are in. Spanish, for some, is part of the American culture and I am going to attempt to learn Spanish next fall.

I’d like to respect the university’s use of foreign language as part of their requirements, but I find the requirement of a foreign language discriminatory. For one, to place in a foreign language, you have to listen to headphones, which is why I had to pick Spanish 1 because I didn’t have the means to place into it. I am a deaf person who has worked all her life to master the English language and its sounds, so even learning how to read and speak another language is more work for me. In fact, I don’t think foreign language should even be required as part of an unrelated degree in order to finish Boston University.

Nathaniel, you have no idea how difficult it was for me to learn something that you take for granted. I’ve asked officials at Boston University to excuse me from the foreign language requirement because of the reasons I stated above, but they stood their ground. I am going to be taking a language, but I am nervous about taking the course.

Sinead Clements CAS ’05