| SignWriting List Archive 1 October 1997 - May 1998 |
March 23, 1998
MESSAGE TO THE SIGNWRITING EMAIL LIST
SUBJECT: SignWriting Literacy
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 1998 18:59:09 -0600 (CST)
From: Rebecca Larche Moreton <mlrlm@sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu>
To: Valerie <DAC@SignWriting.org>
On March 20, 1998, Ben Karlin wrote...
>I like the flashcards idea and the ABC vocabulary ideas that
came out of
>the recent exchanges here (or was that on TERPS-L? SIGNLL?
They all
>run together in my inbox). There is a big push to help out
one of the
>clients here with literacy and I think it may be the motivation
for me
>to get to work at introducing signwriting and english vocabulary
as
>bridges from signs to print. Will see how that works out.
Now, I have an idea for you, and/or others in your group: One
of the good uses of SignWriting would be for the purpose of teaching
ASL to hearing people. The written form would serve the same
purpose that the written form of French, etc., serves in the
learning of spoken languages, kind of a crutch, something visual
on paper to tie meanings to. And of course, the more non-Deaf
who know the language, the better (I mean, it seems so to me;
it certainly ought to better, to have more users of ASL). What
I want to know is, have y'all done any work on this, i.e., the
pedagogical use of SignWritten ASL to help teach people who do
not already know ASL? I'm thinking SignWriting could be used
along with video keyed to it, to show not just individual signs,
as in a dictionary, but connected language, whole utterances,
exchanges. Anything that can anchor new forms is usually a help
to a learner. I do think, though, that just as the texts that
are used to teach non-Deaf German children to read German, must
be structured differently from the texts that are used to teach
English or Spanish-speaking people to read/speak German as a
foreign language, so courses for non-ASL-using people must be
structured differently from the materials used to teach ASL-using
children to read what they alrealy know how to sign. (There's
actually quite a lot know about how to structure courses for
new learners of languages, and you may already have people working
on this kind of thing. If not, it might be worth your time to
find somebody to begin doing this sort of work.)
Free Advice From Mississippi!
Becky
mlrlm@sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu