Little is known about the nature of fingerspelling during sign language interpretation. In this small-scale, exploratory study, we examined the fingerspelling of interpreters working in five different sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), and Italian Sign Language (LIS). Sixteen interpreters were video-recorded as they rendered President Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address in their country’s sign language. After completing their interpretations, the participants engaged in a retrospective interview about their work. The data were analyzed both quantitatively (for frequency and type of fingerspelling) and qualitatively (for factors influencing fingerspelling). Results indicate that the most fingerspelled items ( n = 137) were produced in the ASL interpretations and the fewest ( n = 18) were produced in the LIS interpretations; variation between the groups was found in lexicalized fingerspelling and the fingerspelling of place names. We suggest that the variation in fingerspelling both within and between groups may be explained by sociolinguistic factors, including interpreters’ language attitudes and perceptions of the deaf audience. This exploratory study provides a first step in investigating the fingerspelling of interpreters in a variety of sign languages.

This article addresses the special challenges associated with collecting longitudinal samples of the spontaneous sign language and spoken language production by young bimodal bilingual children. We discuss the methods used in our study of children in the United States and Brazil. Since one of our goals is to observe both sign language and speech, as well as any language mixing, it is important for us to address issues of language choice and techniques for directing the child participant toward primary use of the target language in each session. Suggestions and guidelines for achieving this in effective yet respectful ways are presented. We are especially dependent on the participation, flexibility, and direction of our participant children's parents, who work with us to elicit samples that are genuinely representative of their children's linguistic abilities. We illustrate our procedures for training parents and other interlocutors in data-collection sessions. In return for their generous participation in our research, we address parents' questions and concerns about language development, especially in bimodal bilingual contexts. We take very seriously the need to negotiate with participants regarding their expectations for the use of the data they provide, and we abide by their wishes in this matter. The strategies presented here improve the quality of the investigations we can conduct by making the experiences of the participant families as pleasant as possible.

This study investigated educational provision and learner self-report factors associated with exam success for adult learners of British Sign Language (BSL) who were enrolled in either Level 1 or Level 2 courses. These levels are equivalent to the first and second year of a United Kingdom General Certificate of Secondary Education qualification. Two hundred thirty-five students from three further education colleges answered a self-report questionnaire covering a range of variables. Analysis of the data suggests that: (1) success rates differed markedly for Levels 1 and 2; (2) enhancements of educational provision, such as the use of extra conversational classes, appeared to play a role in increasing exam success rates; (3) individual factors associated with exam success varied between course level and between types of provision; (4) variables related to exam success at Level 2 were more numerous and more specifically related to the learning of sign language than those seen at Level 1; and (5) effect sizes seen for enhancements of educational provision were larger than for individual characteristics. These results offer insights into the factors that affect the success rates of people learning sign language.

Deaf people in Haiti have stated that they use a distinct language, namely Haitian Sign Language (LSH). It has yet to be documented or described. This article is the first attempt at such a description based on a research collaboration between Deaf Haitians and American signed language linguists. Here we describe the language community and its language.

This article discusses the organization of phases of manual movement and nonmovement in sign language conversation, predominantly in, but not limited to, conversational repair. The analysis makes use of video recordings from a Swedish Sign Language corpus (Mesch et al. 2012). It finds that, in signed conversation, different types of holds have diverse interactional implications and that various interactional procedures (e.g., holding a turn or prompting for a response) are associated with the adoption of these holds. Also, aiming for a more fine-grained description, this article proposes novel notions related to phases of manual movement (i.e., the full-hold, the half-hold, and the prolonged stroke). Shifting focus from manual movement purely as a means of conveying lexical meaning, this article proposes an interactional view of movement segments as a locus of situated meaning that emerges during interaction.

The Finnish Museum of the Deaf was founded in 1907, and one of its first tasks was to collect material on Carl Oscar Malm, the founder of Finland’s first school for deaf children. In 1915 part of this material was presented in the museum’s first exhibition space, “the Malm museum room.” The material was collected by deaf people, who, by doing so, defined both themselves and what was important to the Deaf community. Malm is the father of Finnish Sign Language, and his story is the account of the birth of the Finnish Deaf community. He is also a role model, and several leaders of the Finnish Deaf community have been strongly influenced by his work and ideas. For the general public, Malm’s story provides both a historical account of a minority group in Finnish society and a chance to estimate their values.

Teachers of deaf children express concern over a lack of curricular materials appropriate for and beneficial to the deaf population, particularly for language and literacy development and in early childhood classrooms. In addition, more and more deaf children are attending classrooms in which their teachers may not be fluent in ASL. This, too, indicates a need for curricular resources that support and extend language and literacy instruction for deaf children. The current study examines the potential of classroom activities designed to supplement an educational video series in ASL. The participants included one teacher, six deaf children, and one child of a Deaf adult (Coda) in an early childhood classroom. Over the course of two weeks, the teacher showed the participants an educational video and implemented six supplemental activities, all of which were designed to promote a set of early literacy skills (e.g., vocabulary, knowledge of story elements, sequencing ability). Each activity was video-recorded and transcribed for children’s displays of literacy-related behaviors. The teacher also filled out a survey in order to provide feedback on the usability and effectiveness of the activities. The findings suggest that the children displayed many of the targeted skills during the classroom activities, and the descriptive statistics show higher mean scores in targeted skills following the classroom activities. Although they are exploratory, these findings suggest the potential benefit of incorporating such activities into early childhood classrooms.

This article traces the development of the Deaf President Now movement and its similarities to the black civil rights movement.

Reviewed by: Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture by Jennifer Esmail Jennifer Nelson (bio) Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture, by Jennifer Esmail ( Athens : Ohio University Press , 2013 , 296 pp., cloth, $59.95 , ISBN: 978-0-8214-2034-8 ) Reading Victorian Deafness opens with the immortalization in a painting of Queen Victoria’s willingness and ability to fingerspell with a deaf woman, Elizabeth Tuffield, by a deaf painter, William Agnew. Victoria’s actions were contradictory to the spirit of her age in terms of comfort with sign languages and deafness and the focus on limiting the definition of language via the unrelenting rise of oralism. While this book does trace and revisit the historical and linguistic trajectory of events leading to the imposition of oralism on deaf people during this time, the value of Esmail’s book is her focus on deaf subjectivity: “In addition to closely examining Victorian understandings of signed languages, this book focuses on two related topics: Victorian cultural constructions of deafness and the lived experiences and self-representations of deaf Victorians” (4). Her explication of deaf people and their work and writings within the context of the Victorian process of mis-understanding language as speech shows that deaf people actively tried to question and undermine this cultural process. Esmail’s first chapter on deaf poetry and the politics of language “disentangles and then re-entangles the issues that arise in the intersections between deafness, sound, and poetry” (31). Esmail analyzes how deaf poets defended their “voices” in poetry as imagined, silent, and textual—not auditory—constructions of print. Esmail analyzes specifically how deaf poets such as Amos Draper and John Kitto at this time show, in addition to the celebration of visual properties and bodily signs within the poems themselves, how “patterns of rhythm and rhyme were therefore moored in textual practices rather than sound experiences” (30) or speech. Esmail analyzes how “the perceived [End Page 87] gap between deafness and poetic ability was exploited by deaf people, and their allies, in their fight to defend sign language use” (23). The issue faced by nineteenth-century deaf poets was then “not a particular physical disability but rather cultural prejudices about the relationship between disability and poetry” (26). In her second chapter, Esmail underscores the rarity of signing deaf characters in the world of Victorian fiction even as there are numerous examples of deafened, not signing, people in this genre. This chapter “posits that the absence of deafness in Victorian fiction reveals its investment in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality: one that understands fiction as a record of what was said and heard” (70) via problematic silent heroines. Esmail points out how deafness is not as much of a problem for Victorians as the lack of speech and the assumption that writing is a form of “printed orality” (73). For the silent Victorian woman to be acceptable, she had to have access to the oral voice; one thing I would have liked to see Esmail do is indicate that this tradition goes at least as far back as the early modern period in this era’s dependence on speech along with anxieties about being heard and not hearing the wrong thing. These anxieties did not just pop up suddenly in the Victorian era as she seems to indicate.1 Writers like Dickens and Collins show the difficulties of representing deaf characters in fiction via “connecting corporeality to textuality and, more specifically, granting the hands, arms, and face the linguistic complexity of the vocal organs, tongue, and lips within the strictures of a written English text” (71). Esmail also does neglect somewhat a more complete analysis of the Victorian fiction genre in relation to silence, but possibly does so in order to focus on the deaf viewpoint and subjectivity within the works. She argues that Dickens and Collins portray Sophy and Madonna, the deaf women in their works, as having more agency than has often been acknowledged; she also illustrates how Dickens and Collins attempt to incorporate “inaudible voices” (100) and in so doing subtly point out some of...

Using a multimodal literacies framework, this article describes the teaching goals and strategies of three instructor participants in an ASL book-sharing program. The concept of multimodal literacies views literacy as a social practice where the written mode is embedded in other modes of representation. An ethnographic approach that included participant observation and interviews was taken in a ten-month study of parents, children, and instructors participating in the program. In the study, the written mode was embedded in ASL storytelling and children’s books were themselves multimodal resources that were utilized in distinct ways by the instructor participants.