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From:
Fernando Capovilla Date: Sun Oct 4, 1998 1:31 am Subject: videos for training parents to story telling in BrSL written in SW for literacy acquisition | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Hi Valerie! How are you doing? Thank you for your kind message. Since I received your package, I have been studying SignWriting with three deaf students of mine, one of whom (Sylvia) is going to apply for our Master's Program in Experimental Psychology. Sylvia is a very bright young woman, who is congenitally deaf. BrSL is her first language. She is a librarian in a school for deaf children in Sao Paulo, and the deaf kids love to learn sign language from her. She's been educated in the Oral tradition, articulates speech, is skilled at lipreading and can communicate quite well with everyone around her. She is a member of the Sao Paulo Congregation of Deaf People (a traditional organization composed by 40 deaf people who meet twice a month in order to discuss sign usage in Sao Paulo). She's simply thrilled with SignWriting, and is going to take the good news of the arrival of SW to Sao Paulo to the Congregation of Deaf People. I am very glad with the perspective of serving as her advisor in the program, and helping her to fulfill her dreams. My dream would be for her to obtain her Master's and Doctoral degrees in psychology on the subject of deaf education with SW. If she manages to do it, she's going to open an area of research and teaching devoted to BrSL and deaf education. If we achieve this, I think deaf students would have bright new perspectives in Brazil. The University of Sao Paulo is one of the very best Universities in Latin America, but it does not have deaf professors and researchers yet. This may be the beginning of an important change. I hope. I have proposed a plan for her thesis and she's approved of it. I would like to know if I have forgotten something. If you have a suggestion to improve the plan, I would love receiving it from you. The plan goes like this: She is going to record on VCR classic tales from Brazilian Child Literature in BrSL (the most classic of all Brazilian authors for children is Monteiro Lobato, and she's going to tell some of his most classic stories in BrSL). Then she's going to write down the tales using SignWriter. I am hiring an artist to perform the illustrations of those tales. Thus, we plan to have the text written in SignWriting, along with the illustrations by our artist. The plan is to use the tapes and the books as materials for training parents of deaf children to learn BrSL suficiently enough so that they can tell night stories to their deaf children in BrSL while using the book in which the same stories are told in SW. I think if we succeed in this, we may be contributing to early literacy acquisition in SW by our deaf kids. We intend to compare cognitive development of kids exposed to BrSL written in SW (using adaptations of Rescorla's Language Development Survey for expressive language, and of Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test for receptive language development, among others). Three years ago I have translated scales and tests like those and derived Brazilian norms for them, and I have been using them with great success in order to demonstrate the impact of our early intervention procedures with hearing toddlers who have been culturally deprived. I bet adapting them to BrSL is an easy task. I can hardly wait until I can collect some data on expressive and receptive signing by Brazilian deaf kids, so as to obtain some parameters and norms. I hope they serve as baseline for assessing the impact of our procedures for exposing deaf kids at an early age to BrSL in SW, and for training their parents (as multipliers) to sign, read and write in SW. Do you think it may work? Am I forgetting something important? With affection and admiration, Fernando Capovilla :-) PS: thank you for sending the directory of the url's on your web site. We'll be studying it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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