forum SignWriting List Forum
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From:  Steve and Dianne Parkhurst
Date:  Fri Sep 28, 2001  4:46 pm
Subject:  Re: SignWriting in Madrid, Spain...


Dear Valerie,

Warmest greetings from Spain. You asked what we have been up to lately.
Right now we are in the process of trying to wrap up all our existing
projects. As you may know, we are expecting a new little one due in late
December. After that we plan to be in the States for about 9 months. Next
summer we have been asked to help teach a course at the University of North
Dakota on SL linguistics (sponsored by the Summer Institute of Linguistics).
Right now we have a set of three courses planned:

Signed Language Structure
Sociolinguistic factors affecting signed language fieldwork
Signed Languages and Literacy

The last course will focus on SW but there will also be a general
introduction to Stokoe, HamNoSys, and a few other systems. If anyone is
wants more information, please contact me personally at
(don't just respond to this message to the
list).

Back to what we are up to now. As you know we have a lesson book that we
designed to teach Deaf adults to read and write their language. We've had
good success with that (more than 300 students to date). But we realized
that those who are not fluent in LSE (Spanish SL) do not do well with the
book. So we are in the process of cutting the book into 36, 15-minute
modules that can be added to any SL course. The focus is on those who are
just beginning to learn SL. A Deaf organization will be testing out the
materials this year.

The second major project we hope to finish up is a series of videos to
accompany the lesson book so that there is less of a need for trained SW
teachers to teach the courses.

We are also rewriting the lesson book for Catalan SL (the SL used in
Barcelona and Catalunya).

Of course we keep publishing our little SW magazine. We just started the
third year of publications and issue 17 is at the print shop right now. So
little by little we are building up a base of literature.

Last year we picked up our work on the LSE dictionary which lay dormant for
about four years. Dianne needs to make one final check on the Spanish
glosses and then we can send it to you and you can distribute it on your web
page if you would like. So far it has about 4150 signs.

Well, that's a brief update. Sorry to be so silent on the list, but we do
read everyone's comments with interest.

Have a super day!
Steve

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  Replies Author Date
5739 Re: SignWriting in Madrid, Spain... Valerie Sutton Sun  9/30/2001

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