Bencie’s Festschrift
On 9th November we held a Festschrift symposium to celebrate the academic career of Prof. Bencie Woll, DCAL’s founding Director. Current and past colleagues discussed Bencie’s legacy across sociolinguistics, neuroscience and psychology, as well as her efforts to promote changes in public policy, public engagement and capacity building. Tributes celebrating her multidisciplinary long-lasting impact came from her collaborators from around the world, who joined in person and online. To honour Bencie’s scientific and social legacy, we have started a fundraiser for the ‘Bencie Woll Award’ for early career researchers in sign languages. You can contribute to this initiative. It was a wonderful day of celebration and togetherness! If you missed this event, a recording of the event will be available on our website soon.
Congratulations Bencie on your amazing career and achievements which continue to amaze! At the moment Bencie is working with the producers of Sign 2 Win,
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BSL GCSE
Another area that Bencie is working is the BSL GCSE. She is currently a member of the working group (together with Robert Adam) developing the BSL GCSE curriculum for England. Work was very delayed because of Covid but it’s now expected that the curriculum will go out for consultation in January with the aim of the course starting in schools in 2025. At the same time, Bencie been working with the Welsh government to develop the BSL Curriculum for Wales. There are a lot of associated resources and training that will be needed to support a BSL GCSE: the need to train deaf teachers of BSL for work in schools, the development of textbooks, videos and guides for teachers and learners.
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The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus is a publicly accessible, on-line record of BSL used by Deaf people in the UK. It’s a collection of video clips showing Deaf people using BSL, together with background information about the signers and written descriptions of the signing in ELAN. You can also explore BSL SignBank, a wonderful website with approximately 2500 BSL signs developed from the BSL Corpus. In other words, BSL signs directly from the deaf community!
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The current pandemic has changed the ways in which we communicate and work, in many cases with more profound effects for deaf and hard of hearing people. Throughout the pandemic, members of DCAL developed a range of strategies and guidelines to adapt to these new challenges. These include:
• Remote working guidelines to ensure that deaf people could maximise their online participation in virtual meetings and events, and reduce visual demands and fatigue.
• COVID-19 BSL e-books for children, in collaboration with Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children. These e-books provide deaf children who use BSL with direct access to crucial information about coronavirus and its impact on everyday life.
• Information about the impact of face masks on communication. We wrote a statement explaining communication issues due to face coverings, where we highlight the main challenges and also explain some possible adaptations.
• How to caption videos. As part of our commitment to provide accessible info
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Dr. Kate Rowley was recently successful in being awarded a grant from the ESRC. Congratulations! The aim of the project is to investigate the role of language comprehension in deaf children who use BSL and how this may impact reading comprehension. Dr. Patrick Rosenburg will be joining the DCAL team to work full time on this project as a post-doctoral researcher when it starts in January 2022. Patrick previously developed an American Sign Language (ASL) Comprehension Test.
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While face coverings have been important in reducing the spread of Covid-19, it has affected human communication, particularly for deaf and hard-of-hearing people (HoH). In collaboration with Dr. Eva Gutierrez-Sigut (project lead), lecturer at the University of Essex, Dr. Kate Rowley (co-investigator) carried out a survey exploring the impact of face coverings on communication. Responses from 395 deaf/HoH people from the U.K. and Spain revealed that despite difficulties in communication, most deaf/HoH wore masks. Deaf people who became deaf later in life struggled the most with communication and reported lower levels of wellbeing. All deaf people, whether they became deaf early or late in life, reported that they were missing more information and felt more disconnected from society.
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We continue our longitudinal Preschool Language and Literacy project, which investigates how early spoken and sign language skills relate to reading later on. Yet again, due to COVID-19, we were not able to visit schools and assess children in the spring. Teachers have kindly helped us out and tested children on our behalf. The team is busy working through data, and planning the next phase of data collection in spring/summer 2022. We look forward to visiting all children and schools next year!
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Happy Christmas from all of us at DCAL
We hope you enjoyed reading our highlights.
If you want to know any more about any of these topics, please do contact us.
Thank you for all of your support and interest in our work over 2021.
We look forward to working together in 2022!
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