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From:
Valerie Sutton Date: Fri Mar 9, 2001 4:59 pm Subject: Greetings from James in Maine | |
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Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2001 Subject: Greetings from James in Maine From: To: SignWriting List Hi, Valerie and dedicated Valerie disciples (Suttonites?), I returned from tropical Bluefields, Nicaragua last Friday, promptly injuring myself by slipping on ice. Since then, we've had almost two feet more snow here, and ten inches forecast for tonight. I trained a USM student in SW last fall and she accompanied me to Bluefields in order to devote five weeks to eliciting more entries for our SW dictionary file. So, I will get that to you at some point in the weeks ahead after we go through it all. It's a process.... We tried a new method for teaching some Spanish this term. Since most students are able to sight read most of the signs in SW, we decided to work on their ability to communicate in written spanish. The idea is to be able to express themselves, through writing, with the hearing people around them. So we prepared FLASHCARDS depicting sentences: Spanish on one side and Nicaraguan Sign Language (in SW, of course) on the other. We were not particularly interested in Spanish grammar. That is, the sentences were written correctly, but we did not discuss Spanish rules of grammar. Rather, the students were expected to memorize the sentences by rote. On the other hand, we would discuss the syntax associated with the sentences produced in SW. Nicaraguan Sign Language is the student's native language afterall, and each student has some competency in expressing opinions as to what is correct and what seems awkward. Anyway, the main point in doing this was to emphasize that Nicaraguan Sign Language does not and should not correspond word for word with Spanish. I have found that if students are constantly taught word-for-word translations, they invariably fall back into the misconception that translations of sentences can be matched on a word-for-word basis; ultimately, the signs are reordered to match Spanish syntax; and in the end nobody understands anybody. An example of a flashcard: Yo tengo que ir al doctor. I NEED TO GO TO THE DOCTOR. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, "need" is a serial verb, almost always appearing as "I need - I want". You will note that this sentence easily lends itself to object substitutions: I NEED TO GO TO: -- hospital, -- school, -- store. Anyway, this seemed to work pretty well. Our goal was one sentence per week, plus a list of substitution words. Staples, by the way, sells blank flashcards. We print the SignWriting on label paper and affix it to the card. Then we write the Spanish on the flipside with a marker pen. So much for Spanish -- we continue to distribute stories written only in sign language, since students ought to be able to read full texts in their native language. -- James Shepard-Kegl |
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