Sign Language Companion: A Handbook of British Signs - Softcover

Smith, Cath

 
9780285633339: Sign Language Companion: A Handbook of British Signs
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0285633333 ISBN 13: 9780285633339
Verlag: Souvenir Press, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

A practical guide with over 400 illustrations, covering a wide range of topics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cath Smith is a qualified social worker with deaf people and a registered BSL interpreter.

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(Introduction) British Sign Language (BSL) is Britain's fourth language. What are the first three? Some rather inventive suggestions have been given in answer to this question, as wide-ranging as Punjabi, Semaphore and French! Britain's indigenous languages, those that have evolved naturally in this country, are English, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. (Walk through any big British town and you can hear languages as diverse as Cantonese, Spanish, Urdu and Greek, but these are not native to Britain.)......................................................The situation for BSL users has similarities with other 'minority' language users and also important differences. In 1988 the European Parliament called on member nations to recognise their own sign languages as official languages of their countries, yet BSL is still not fully recognised as a language of Britain. This has implications for its status and the status of the Deaf community who use it, with the result that BSL is not used for teaching the majority of schools attended by deaf children, is not a language option in mainstream schools, and there are virtually no Deaf teachers of the deaf (with a very few exceptions). Policies, determined in the main by non-Deaf people, continue to promote speech and lipreading (oral communication), or sign systems that support oral communication but which lack the visual grammar of BSL that gives the unconstrained and natural communication needed for the early development of a first language......................... A HEAD FOR LANGUAGE How the brain works in relation to language has some interesting aspects that are useful to think about. A possible place to start is with the young infant. The word 'infant' itself is derived from Latin and means 'non-speaking'. The period of the brain's greatest plasticity, when it is at its most receptive to language, is from this stage of infancy until about three years of age. This is when children make the most spectacular progress in building their own constructions and producing for themselves a language that has not been 'taught' to them, but has been shared with them. It is this sharing, the everyday meaningful exchanges of family and community, that enables this phenomenon to happen, an ability that diminishes as the child matures. This critical period is the same for all human beings with healthy brains, deaf or hearing. None of us are born with a language but we are born with an innate capacity for it. Deaf children may face obstacles to the natural development of language, but they have no inherent lack of ability............................. ................A simple illustration of these processes would be an instruction such as 'turn right at the traffic lights'. In BSL, traffic lights (one sign) would be signed first, followed by turn right (one sign). This not only reflects the real order of events, a crucial and distinguishing feature of visual language, but uses classifying handshapes to indicate lights and vehicle, which are located in space with appropriate directional movement to suit the context. In this way, information is condensed into just two signs, enabling the expression of an instruction that would require six spoken words. Brilliant. Imagine the possibilities in signed English - turn ...right.....at.....CRUNCH. The reason why it is so important to understand this type of process is that it explains some of the misconceptions about sign language, and why Deaf BSL users find signed forms of English such a strain. Deaf people say that when signs are used to accompany speech, they can understand each item as it appears, but find difficulty taking in the message content as a whole when all the information is expressed in the linear sequence of spoken language. The patterning that enables meaning to be given in chunks is inappropriate to sign language, and has to be 'worked out' by the receiver. In addition, because sign production is slower than speech, unless many items are simply missed out, then the whole thing is slowed down. This has the effect of lengthening the units of meaning that put the message across, making understanding more difficult.

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Verlag
Souvenir Press
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0285633333
ISBN 13 
9780285633339
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
144
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar