Handedness

In class recently, a very observant classmate noticed that I was doing my ordinals with my non-dominant hand. I have probably been doing this for three years and no-one had ever noticed, including me! Ordinals are when you say something like, 'There are five things to remember: number one (blah blah blah) and number two (blah blah blah), and so on. In Auslan you generally tell your audience how many things are in the list first and then you count through from number one to, say five in this instance, interspersing the counting through the list with each piece of information, as above. In Auslan, ordinals are indicated by signs involving pointing with your dominant hand to the finger on the non-dominant hand that indicates which number thing in the list you are up to. (I will perhaps upload a video link of this later to illustrate).

Anyway, I am a right-hander and I have, all this time, been pointing with my left hand and indicating the list number on my right hand. This feels more natural to me and it's going to take a bit of effort to change. Having said that, doing this the 'wrong' way does not impede meaning, but does interrupt the flow of the person reading my signing because it's a pattern they don't expect.

This has made me ponder a little on the subject of handedness. Our class seems divided between those who notice whether a signer is left or right handed and those who don't. We have plenty of exposure to both, as one of our classmates is left-handed and several videos we have watched feature left-handers. I am one of the people who does not notice handedness. Interestingly, the person who noticed my handedness inconsistency, is someone who notices whether someone is left- or right-hand dominant. She says that left-handedness, being less common, gives her some trouble in reading Auslan until she consciously realises that she is watching a left-hander, and then it ceases to be a problem. I find this anecdotal fascinating and wonder if it is evidence that not everyone processes this visual information in the same way. It would be really cool to do some FRMI scanning of brains to detect differences in activity between people who notice handedness and those who don't.

Holiday plans

Yay! I’ve finished CIT for the year. I am not celebrating too loudly though, because I really enjoy it. It’s just that after a whole year, you do get a bit tired, so the summer break is welcome. I just hope I don’t forget everything over the summer, which is another good reason to keep this blog ticking along – to keep me engaged with Auslan matters.
Over the summer I am planning to keep doing some learning by watching more YouTube videos. I’ve also purchased my first video camera recently, so I’d like to film myself signing some more. I’ve already noticed that my signing doesn’t look like I expected it to. My hands often seem soft, with open, rounded fingers when they should be straight and together, for example. It’s a bit icky to look at oneself on film, but it really is valuable. Thank you to the interpreter who told me that filming herself was invaluable practice for her in her early days.
The other thing I would like to do over the hols is devote a bit of time to some linguistic research. I now have about five pages of questions relating to how adults learn fingerspelling. Next, I need to hit up my teachers for a bit of their time to ask them about their perceptions of how adults learn fingerspelling.

Another unrelated area I would like to explore more is the world of overheard conversation. I work in a cubicle within an open-plan office. It gets pretty noisy some days, so I often wear earplugs to block out the sound. This means I don’t hear the corridor conversations or the phone chatter around me. Although I am able to focus more on my work, I always have a niggling feeling that I might be missing out on some useful information. This, of course, is the situation for Deaf people all the time. But what exactly are they missing? What is the nature of those types of conversations? What are the costs and benefits of not having access to the information in overheard conversations? What are the ways people catch up on information not overheard? How does this differ between professional, home and social life?
Hmmm….lots to think about over summer….

CART - Real-time Captioning

Now that the Canberra Deaf Club is sending out more frequent emails about upcoming events around Canberra and further afield, I'm finding out about more opportunities for me to practice and learn things related to Auslan. One of these opportunities last week was an ACT Government town-hall-style meeting for people to have their say about accessibility issues for disabled people. The event was advertised as Auslan-interpreted. So I went along, and sure enough, the interpreter was there. I arrived slightly late and was puzzled to see that the interpreters' hands were still - it turned out that none of the punters who had turned up needed access through Auslan. The other student who had also turned up for the same reason as I did, must have been just as disappointed that we couldn't get a good hour and a half of practice in. The other student stuck it out longer than I did - I stayed for half an hour and listened to citizens' frustrations and the standard responses from government officials and the private consultants to whom they palm the issues off to, at greater expense to the public.

Before I get too cynical, I should mention the most positive part of the event for me - I got a chance to watch the CART system. CART stands for Communication Access Real-time Translation or Computer Assisted Realtime Transcription (whichever you prefer). Although I am an ex-captioner of closed-caption TV, I never did real-time captioning, for which you need stenographer's skills (like for court reporting or hansard). The captioner simply typed the speaker's words into their specialist machines and, via a laptop and a project, the words appeared printed on the big screen for all to read with only a few seconds' delay. For some reason, I had thought that CART was way more complicated - possibly because of the acronyms or long words in the title. Yay - one more mystery solved!

Interpreted mock conference at Macquarie Uni

Last Saturday, I drove all the way to the big smoke to watch three and a half hours of sign language at Macquarie University. It was a mock conference that some of the advanced interpreting students there were required to interpret as part of their course. Basically, it was like a real conference - in a lecture theatre with proper speakers giving proper presentations with proper powerpoint slides. The interpreting students worked in teams of two. Each student interpreted half a presentation from Auslan to English and then, later, half of another presentation from English to Auslan. It was amazing to see the range of styles that the interpreters had in Auslan. I guess it's the equivalent of voice quality, accent and general demeanor in English, but when they were speaking English, I didn't think about those things consciously - I guess you just process that information without noticing when it's your native language. In a non-native langugage, however, I notice all that stuff. Auslan is also a non-native language for some of the interpreters and I thought I could tell who was a native signer and who wasn't. Generally, the interpreters were wonderful. It's such a hard thing to do, but it was pretty rare that there was a panicky silence or pause during which time their team buddy would feed them what they missed.

All this focus on the interpreters is doing an injustice to the speakers themselves, however. I loved hearing about the experiences and views of the Deaf presenters who signed about the education system, using interpreters in a corporate training environment, deaf-blind services, and deaf relay interpreting. The four hearing presenters talked about being a parent of Deaf children, sign variation in New Zealand sign language and interpreter's attitudes when confronted with a choice of variant signs, how interpreters are judged using rating systems, and ONE OTHER TOPICS I HAVE FORGOTTEN - WILL LOOK UP WHEN I GET HOME AND FILL IN THIS BLANK LATER!

All in all, I learned a terrific amount from this day. I went home thinking that I would so love to one day be skilled enough to sign like these interpreters. At this point, I don't know if I have the ability to do this, but at least it has given me some renewed enthusiasm to keep practicing through the summer.

Deaf event a success

I am happy to report that the show for the AFL Grand Final all came together on the day, but only at the last minute. K (my classmate) and I breathed a big sigh of relief when, on the afternoon before the final, we finally heard that the Southern Cross Club had gotten the captions working on TVs for us and that the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) had come through with some funding (after initially losing our application). We had about 20 people turn up and I think everyone had a good time. St Kilda and Collingwood also played their part by adding tremendous drama to the occasion by drawing the match – only the third time in history that the grand final had to be replayed.
A big thank you to all the people who came along, to CIT, whose support enabled us to provide food and drink for the event, and to the Southern Cross Club in Woden for never questioning the fact that Deaf people have the right to have the captions on the club, even when some club patrons complained just prior to our group turning up. Thank you!
PS. Note to self: never go into event management - too stressful!

The politics of captioning

This week I have been organising an event for the local Deaf community. This is part of our assessment for a module we are doing called “Auslan for Social Settings”. It is a really good idea – gets you out there meeting and speaking with the local community and is a chance for students to give back to the community, some of whom very generously volunteer as native language users in our classes from time to time. Usually these classroom events take the form of us students grilling the Deaf volunteers about all aspects of their lives!
Anyway, a classmate and I have opted to put on a shindig for the AFL grand final. My mission last weekend was to scope out some likely venues. Requirements were that it was kid-friendly, had lots of TV screens, enough space for our group and that the proprietors would agree to turning on the game’s captions. This turned out to be harder than I thought. I traipsed around 5 venues in Civic and 3 in Woden. The main problem was lack of big TVs and lack of seating in same areas as TVs. Had visions of our group having to either choose between standing for 3 hours and watching the game, or sitting for 3 hours and not seeing the game. I talked to a couple of managers and most were receptive to the idea of turning the captions on, although none knew exactly how to do it. I basically kept going until I found a club/pub I thought would fit the bill. My search ended at the sports bar in the Southern Cross Club in Woden – TVs everywhere you look, including a big projection screen for special events. The only catch was the Sunday manager said the shiny, modern flatscreen TVs couldn’t receive captions. I was sure this was BS, but didn’t think it would further my cause if I started raving on about the Disability Discrimination Act then and there. Fortunately, I found out that the Saturday manager was a different guy, got his number and rang him on Tuesday when he returned to work. He thought it was fine to turn on the captions, providing he could figure out how to do it – he needed to check with the reps who supply the TV equipment. He had a meeting with them on Thursday. I started getting nervous at this point. What if they said they would put the captions on and then don’t on the day? Then I thought about what it is like for a hearing person in a bar watching sport – you often can’t hear the sound anyway – it is either off or drowned out by chatter. So was this a moot point anyway? If hearing people don’t expect access to commentary in a pub, should Deaf people? And then I wondered about whether live captioning is annoying to some people on the footy – the commentators are usually just drivelling on about nothing to start with – receiving that drivel with a 10 second delay in written English with creative grammar might mean lots of Deaf people don’t bother with footy captioning. In short, I began wondering if we really needed captions. This was quickly followed by the realisation that I had blithely stepped into a political minefield. I felt an underlying uneasiness of knowing that as a hearing person, I was in the process of making a decision that would potentially deny Deaf people the choice to use or not use captions. And that is the point – they should have the choice. Hearing people have the choice to have the sound on or off (even if it is drivel) and Deaf people should have the equivalent choice. The club has since confirmed that captions will be available. Fingers crossed!

Yay: more fingerpelling practice!

One of the biggest challenges in learning Auslan is mastering the reading back of fingerspelling. It's something that every learner struggles with: the feelings of embarrassment from asking someone to fingerspell the same word 3 or 4 times; the feeling of panic when you start missing words during a situation which doesn't permit requests for a slower respell, not to mention the defeat you feel when you encounter a signer whose fingerspelling is just so fast that you swear you can feel your hair blowing back from your face, as if their fingers are an electric fan. Yes, learning fingerspelling can be demoralising sometimes. But there are also undeniable moments of joy, like when you do catch someone's name the first time, moments of pride when you understand a word someone else has missed, and the sheer triumph of recognising a really long word - feels to me like the Auslan equivalent of using all your letters in one go in Scrabble!

Alas, there seem to be no shortcuts to success in reading back fingerspelling. The advice on how to improve is simple: the more practice, the better, and the more varied the practice the better. That is, it's helpful to watch fingerspelling from older signers, younger singers, men, women, native signers and non-native signers, because in the real world people have different fingerspelling styles and accents.

Yet, it's difficult to find opportunities to intensively practice reading back fingerspelling. There are relatively few study materials such as CDs available for fingerspelling practice and once you know which words are on the CD it becomes obsolete. A solution to this problem using YouTube has recently occurred to my class. The idea is that signers could upload short fingerspelled lists of 20 words, creating a collection of excellent learning resources quickly and easily, available free to all. There would be a broad range of styles and accents represented. Native and fluent fingerspellers could provide expert fingerspelling modelling for learners to watch and learners could upload their videos for feedback from others. Limiting each video to 20 words would ensure that all videos are brief enough to be uploaded quickly by the makers and download quickly by the viewers.

Below are my first four efforts, available on YouTube. I chose to give each set of 20 words a theme. This gives viewers at least some contextual help in identifying the words, which is, afterall, what happens in the real world.

I've tried following these handy tips for ensuring good quality video:

• decent lighting
• including in the frame both my face and hands, so that any mouth patterns are captured (although I tried not to mouth words too overtly)
• wearing clothing that contrasts with my skin colour so my hands don't blend into my shirt
• I tried to remember to mute the video (personal choice, as a viewer could also choose to hit the mute button, however this way the no-one has to know that while I was recording this video my bloke was watching the footy, the fridge was changing gears and the cat was scratching more holes in the carpet!)
  

Now we just need to find some ways to make this catch on around the country so a good collection of videos becomes available.

Fingerspelling practice set 1: African countries


Fingerspelling practice 2: Australian towns and cities


Fingerspelling practice 3: American states


Fingerspelling practice 4: Australian birds

Nailed it: Robert Adam's Senate Submission

On a rainy Sunday afternoon I decided to go to the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) to finish looking at some of the fine Australian modern paintings I didn't quite get my fill of when I went for a fabulous sign interpreted tour a couple of weeks ago. The problem with that is that the NGA is near the National Library of Australia and I thought I would just pop in for five minutes to run "Auslan" through the search engine. Y'know - just for kicks! One hour later and I'm still here but I'm real happy because I've struck gold! I've come across the submissions to the senate inquiry into hearing health in Australia. The terms of reference for the inquiry are:
Hearing health in Australia, with particular reference to:

• the extent, causes and costs of hearing impairment in Australia;
• the implications of hearing impairment for individuals and the community;
• the adequacy of access to hearing services, including assessment and support services, and hearing technologies;
• the adequacy of current hearing health and research programs, including education and awareness programs; and
• specific issues affecting Indigenous communities.

The first thing I noticed was the use of the word "health" in the inquiry title and throughout the ToR, making the medical model of hearing the default conceptual frame for the whole exercise. Second thing was the diversity of organisations and individuals who made submissions - 187 of them! After clicking on a couple of submissions at random by an economist and a speech pathologist, I recognised a familiar name: Robert Adam. I and many other Auslan learners may know him as one of the guys on the Victorian video tapes who fingerspells way too fast for me to understand! (Note to self: must practice reading back more!) But to the rest of the world he is one of the Australian Deaf community's foremost members, and a prominent advocate for Deaf equality. Currently he is doing a PhD on contact between BSL and Irish Sign Language at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College, London. (A topic for another blog post, perhaps.)

In Robert Adam's six-page submission to the senate inquiry he addresses some of the most prevalent myths about language acquisition by Deaf children, backing up his statements with strong evidence from peer-reviewed and published science from around the world. He also clearly shows that Australia is in breach of its international obligations on human rights regarding its lack of provision of services for Deaf people. It's impressive writing and I encourage people to read the whole six pages, but if you haven't got time, these are Robert Adam's recommendations:

"• That the Australian Government meets its obligations under the National Policy on Languages, the Disability Discrimination Act and the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by ensuring that every child born with a hearing loss have access to a sign
language.
• That the Australian Government implement a national strategy to ensure that all children with a hearing loss have access to Auslan as a first language on diagnosis.
• That parents of children diagnosed with a hearing loss have access to Auslan classes, and are able to meet with Deaf role models.
• That hearing parents of children with a hearing loss have access to support and Deaf role models in well-structured early intervention programmes.
• That all cochlear implantation programmes be required to incorporate Auslan classes for implantees and their families.
• That the education of Deaf children include such subjects as Deaf studies (including study of Deaf history, folklore, and Deaf culture)."

I couldn't agree more and I'm so pleased that the argument he has made has been delivered so succinctly and powerfully. Thank you, Mr Adam, you've made my week!

Now, off to the NGA for one more hour of inspiration!

Fingerspelling: a definition

This semester we are doing a module concentrating on fingerspelling and numbers in Auslan. We started off by critiquing four existing definitions of fingerspelling from the literature. Some were pretty complicated and some used airy-fairy terms such as “writing in the air”. Then our teacher asked us to come up with our own definition. As per usual, I came up with an even more incomprehensible alternative, cramming way too many concepts into the definition using words that were way too cumbersome. After reflection, I realise that it’s actually pretty simple. The core concepts are:

• the two languages (one signed, one written)
• the signs and letters within those languages that make up alphabets

I came up with two more potential definitions of fingerspelling:

The use of signs in a sign language or manual code that represent letters in a spoken and written language, enabling the spelling of words from the spoken and written language using only one’s hands.

Use of the signs in a signed language or code that represent the letters in the alphabet of a written language to transliterate units of meaning from a written language into a signed language.

Neither are as elegant as they could be, but the concepts included (and those excluded) work for me because: the definition is generalisable worldwide they include both signed languages and signed codes (e.g. signed English) which both use fingerspelling. they include the element of transfer between languages or a language to a code. Thinking about this prompted me to look up fingerspelling in some nearby dictionaries. At work, we have access to the Australian Macquarie Dictionary It defines “fingerspell” like this:

A form of sign language in which the letters of the word are signed individually to spell it out.

I think this definition has at least these problems:

1. It implies that fingerspelling is a sign language of its own. As fingerspelling only consists of a meagre 26 (in Anglophone contexts) signs, this really cannot be true. It would be more accurate to say that fingerspelling is a part of sign language, not a form.
2. Restricting fingerspelling to use within a sign language also means that signed codes such as signed English are given the status of language. Because they are not productive in the sense that natural languages are productive, signed codes cannot be called languages. Yet, signed English does use fingerspelling, so I think manual codes and sign languages both need to be specified within the definition.
3. This definition does not mention the source language from which the concepts of letters and words come. In fact it seems to assume that sign languages inherently have letters and words. Not being a written language, Auslan would have no need for letters if it existed on its own. It is only through Auslan’s close contact with English that Auslan has adopted the concepts of letters, necessitating a way to represent them with ones’ hands (i.e. fingerspelling). The concept of “word” is also borrowed from English, as the equivalent in sign language is “sign”. Therefore reference to both the source language of the written/spoken letters and the target language of the equivalent signed letters is required within the definition.

I think Wikipedia is pretty close to the perfect definition:

Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands.

Elegant and complete! Thank you lay lexicographers of the interwebs!
Think I might write to the Macquarie people...