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