Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 11 (2021) Issue 1, pp. 93-114
Modality-Focused L2-Instruction
in Swedish Sign Language
Ingela Holmström (Stockholm, Sweden)
Abstract (English)
Most second language (L2) learning happens in the same modality, i.e., a learner who has a spoken language as the first language most commonly learns additional spoken languages as L2. In such language acquisition cases, learners can build on what they already physically know about how to express language. But, if they begin to learn a sign language, they have to learn how to express language in a new modality, i.e. the visual-gestural one. It requires expressing the language using hands, arms, face, and body instead of the speech organs, and this is very unfamiliar for them. Furthermore, learners need to learn specific linguistic features that largely differ from those of spoken languages, such as spatiality, iconicity and simultaneity. In this paper, the teaching of such modality-specific features in a cohort of first-year hearing L2 students, who are learning Swedish Sign Language at the university level, is examined and described. This empirical study shows a language teaching context that largely differs from other language teaching contexts and how students experience this new language learning process.
Keywords: Sign language, visual modality, second language, instruction, action research
Abstract (Swedish)
Det vanligaste är att andraspråksinlärning sker inom samma modalitet som förstaspråket. Det betyder att inlärare som har ett talat språk som förstaspråk (L1) oftast lär sig andra talade språk som andraspråk (L2). I sådana fall av språktillägnande kan inlärarna utgå ifrån vad de redan vet om hur man uttrycker språk rent fysiologiskt. Men om inlärarna som har ett talat språk som L1 istället börjar lära sig ett teckenspråk som L2 måste de samtidigt lära sig att uttrycka språket i en ny modalitet, dvs. den visuellt-gestuella. Detta innebär att de istället för att använda talorganen uttrycker språket med händerna, armarna, ansiktet och kroppen, vilket kan upplevas som väldigt annorlunda och främmande. Inlärarna måste också lära sig teckenspråkets specifika särdrag som till stor del skiljer sig från det talade språkets, såsom spatialitet, ikonicitet och simultanitet. I föreliggande empiriskpå universitetsnivå. Studien skildrar en form av andraspråkundervisning som till stor del skiljer sig från annan sådan undervisning och beskriver också hur inlärarna själva upplever denna nya språkinlärningsprocess.a studie undersöks och beskrivs hur undervisningen av sådana modalitetsspecifika särdrag ser ut med utgångspunkt i en årskull förstaårsstudenter som läser svenskt teckenspråk som L2
Nyckelord: Teckenspråk, visuell modalitet, andraspråk, undervisning, aktionforskning
1 Introduction
“It was extremely difficult! It’s something brand new!” the student responded in a written interview regarding her initial experience from learning Swedish Sign Language (STS) at the beginner level in a university class. This utterance captures the common perception among sign language teachers and researchers that one of the most unfamiliar things with learning a sign language (when having a spoken language as the first language) is to learn to express the language with hands, arms, face, and body instead of the speech organs (e.g. Chen Pichler & Koulidobrova 2015, Woll 2013). This is described as learning to express a language in a new modality, i.e. the visual-gestural modality.
The most common case is that learning additional languages after the first language (L1) has been acquired happens in the same modality. In other words, a learner who has a spoken language as his or her L1 most commonly learns additional spoken languages as second languages (L2). Also, signers with sign language as the L1 may learn an additional sign language as their L2. In such language acquisition cases, learners can build on what they already physically know about how to express language. This is not the case when having a spoken language as L1 and learning a sign language as L2, and vice versa. In order to differentiate between L2 learning in the same modality (unimodal L2 learning) and the learning of an L2 expressed in another modality (bimodal L2 learning), it is usual to use the abbreviation M2-L2, where M2 stands for ‘second modality’ (e.g. Chen Pichler & Koulidobrova 2015).
One such empirical study was conducted by Boers-Visker (2020), who examined the effects of form-focused interventions in three groups learning Sign Language of the Netherlands. Her focus was on the L2 learning of the agreement verb system, and the three groups examined were instructed through different teaching strategies, each one using different degrees of explicitness. One of the groups was a control group that did not receive input focused on the agreement verb system, at all. Boers-Visker (2020: 298) concludes that the form-focused intervention was beneficial for the two groups who had received more explicit instruction in the form of input flood only, or input flood together with rule presentation and explicit corrective feedback.
The overall aim in Boers-Visker’s doctoral thesis was to study how hearing L2 learners of sign language learn how to use a specific modality characteristic of sign languagee: the space in front of the body. This characteristic has been identified as particularly difficult for M2-L2 learners and has engaged several researchers in the sign-language L2-field on different linguistic levels. For example, Shield & Meier (2018), who focused on the phonological level of single signs, suggest that sign language learners have four imitation strategies at their disposal when learning to sign and use space:
● anatomical strategy: they activate the same muscles as the signer, and thus, they may produce the sign with their non-dominant hand instead of their dominant as is correct);
● mirroring strategy (they produce a sign that is a mirror of the signer’s, leading to incorrect reversal movements)
● visual matching strategy: they incorrectly produce the sign as perceived from their own perspective, which leads to the use of incorrect inward or outward movements or palm orientations), and
● reversing strategy: they correctly produce the sign from the signer’s perspective.
Shield & Meier (2018 15) found that adults learning a sign language typically tend to use the mirroring strategy but also use the visual matching strategy and sometimes the anatomical strategy. More skilled signers instead employ the (correct) reversing strategy.
The fact that adult sign language learners struggle with the learning of spatial features has also been found by Ferrara & Nilsson (2017). They examined a group of students learning Norwegian Sign Language and found, among other things, that students had difficulties placing signs in the signing space, and coordinating and positioning their hands in relation to each other. Ferrara & Nilsson also found another feature among their students that can be related to modality: the latter preferred to use more lexical signs (in line with how spoken language is expressed) rather than depicting signs i.e. signs that are part of the productive lexicon and dependent on the context, which can depict a movement, a shape, a location or the handling of an object. These findings can inform sign-language teachers in their teaching of M2-L2 learners.
Morett (2015) also touches on the field of sign language pedagogy. She found that hearing adults’ acquisition of sign language can be enhanced through a teaching method that combines mental imagery, i.e. explicit instruction that students create a mental image of the meaning of a given sign in their minds, and enactment, i.e. students were asked to re-enact new signs that they learned. Morett argues that such a teaching method “strengthens the conceptual links between sign referents, resulting in improved encoding and recall of signs by novice adult hearing L2 sign learners” (Morett 2015: 272).
The research presented here represents a contribution to the field of sign language pedagogy and is an empirical study focusing on the M2-L2 acquisition of modality-specific features. The study examines the approaches used by STS-instructors to teach modality-specific features to hearing beginners during the first eight weeks of instruction.
In the next section, the characteristics of sign language modality will be described more closely.
2 Characteristics of the Sign Language Modality
There are many shared properties between sign languages and spoken languages the most important of which are the following ones:
● They both have conventional vocabularies, which are productive; new vocabulary is added through borrowing and compounding, for example
● They have similar syntactic structures, e.g. the same parts of speech), and
● They have the same language acquisition milestones). (Meier 2002, 2006).
There are, however, also several differences between the languages, which primarily depend on the fact that they are expressed in different modalities, e.g. the visual-gestural vs. the oral-aural. Meier (2002) suggests four possible sources of modality effects on linguistic structure:
1. the articulators’ different properties,
2. the different perceptual system,
3. the visual-gestural system’s greater potential to iconic / indexic representation, and
4. the youth of sign languages and their non-linguistic roots in gestures (Meier 2002: 6f).
Thus, sign languages build on what can be expressed through hands, face and body, and on what can be perceived through the eyes. The signs are composed through a combination of the parameters of handshape, movement, location and orientation and can be combined into sentences and inflected for various purposes.
Three particular characteristics of sign languages are their iconicity, spatiality, and simultaneity. Iconicity means that a large proportion of the signs are visually motivated, having a resemblance between form and meaning. In other words, iconic signs look like what they mean, and thus, it is possible to figure out their meaning (Taub 2012: 389ff). These iconic signs consist of fixed, conventionalized signs and depicting signs. The former are lexemes that resemble enactment (e.g. write , swim) or show a feature of size or shape of an object (e.g. ball), while the latter are signs that depend on the context and do not have any fixed forms, e.g. signs which show how entities move or are handled as in ‘open’ that depends on whether the object being opened is a door, a bottle or a water tap. Depicting signs are often used in situations where the signer describes the environment, as seen by him or herself or by a character, or takes on the role of a character who is handling objects.
Spatiality means that sign languages use the place in front of the signer’s body to produce signs. This space is used for the articulation of lexical signs, but also for grammatical and discourse purposes (Boers-Visker 2020, Perniss 2012). For example, the direction of a sign can indicate the subject and object in an utterance, and the placing of signs at different locations can organize information or referents in a given narrative.
Simultaneity is about the fact that sign languages favor producing different features or structures at the same time, while the oral-aural modality of spoken languages entails sequential structures (Meier 2002, 2006). Simultaneity can be found in that the two hands can express different signs in tandem, but also through the fact that the signer's hands can express manual signs with lexical content while the face at the same time adds grammatical content to the utterances.
Another characteristic of sign languages is the manner in which the interaction takes place. For example, eye contact is essential for sign language communication because if the interlocutors do not look at each other, they cannot communicate. The addressee thus needs to pay visual attention to the signer, and this also regulates how turn-taking takes place in sign language communication. While in the oral-aural modality, it is possible to just take the turn, it must be obtained in the visual-gestural one. As a consequence, the signer has to seek the addressee’s attention in visual or tactile ways. For example, the signer can touch the addressee, wave with the hand in the addressee’s field of vision, bang on a surface (to create vibrations), or switch the light on and off (Baker & van den Bogaerde 2012).
As shown in the description here, the properties of the sign language modality thus occur at different levels, from phonological to discourse and conversational levels. It is, therefore, not sufficient to simply point out to what “modality-specific” instruction should contain. In this article, however, exercises that aim to train the four specific aspects mentioned here (iconicity, spatiality, simultaneity, and visual attention) will be examined.
3 The Study
In 2016, a project was initiated at Stockholm University, whose aim was to enhance teachers’ knowledge about effective ways of teaching STS as an L2. The project, UTL2 (Teaching Swedish Sign Language as a second language), was initiated by two deaf STS teachers, who experienced a lack of scientific knowledge to rely on in their teaching. Together with a (deaf) researcher (the author of the present paper), they began to prepare for the project. The project group decided to use action research as their method, because this method takes its point of departure in the teachers’ own teaching practice and provides opportunities for teachers to learn more about it and give them prerequisites to improve it (e.g. McAteer 2013). It has also been used in sign language teaching research previously (Rosen et al. 2015) and inspired the team to use this approach.
The action research process (McAteer 2013, Rönnerman 2004) can be seen as a cycle (Figure 1) which starts with the identification of a problem to be examined in depth:
Figure 1: The Cycle of Action Research
After identification, a plan is made for the examination before the action takes place. This action can, for example, consist of testing teaching methods, evaluating different assessments or developing new exercises. Simultaneously, it is crucial to observe what actually happens, for example, through video recordings or field notes. After these phases, the process, results and outcomes are reflected on, for example, within the teacher team. After conducting a project in such a cycle, the knowledge generated from the project is implemented in the practice, and informs further development work, for example, in a new study on the practice.
The project group followed these phases and planned and prepared a first sub-study that aimed to examine whether students benefited more from initial teaching conducted in mainly spoken Swedish or mainly STS (Holmström 2018a, 2018b). The students were divided into two groups. In group A, teaching was primarily conducted by deaf teachers, in STS, and in group B, it was conducted with hearing teachers. The primary language was spoken Swedish. After three weeks of such initial teaching, both groups became instructed in STS and spoken Swedish in parallel (in different lessons). Students’ outcomes were examined through an elicited imitation task, SignRepL2, which consisted in watching a recording of an STS signer producing single signs, two-sign sentences, and three-sign sentences, and in imitating these as exactly as possible (Holmström 2018a). In addition, participant observations and video recordings of the classroom interaction were made to study how the teaching was conducted and to discover recurring patterns and phenomena in each form of instruction. This sub-study revealed that there were no differences in the students’ outcomes regarding their signing skills, but that the group which had received initial instruction through mainly spoken Swedish obtained better metalinguistic knowledge and obtained higher grades in the theoretical classes (Holmström 2018a, 2018b, 2019). The outcomes were discussed and analysed in a team of teachers at the university, and resulted, among other things, in changes in the curriculum.
The teacher team, consisting of five deaf L1 teachers (including the two project-team teachers) and two hearing teachers (one fluent L2 signer and one L1 signer), concluded that students who had been instructed mainly through spoken Swedish showed a lack of visual attention and a lack of visual-gestural modality-behaviour in their social interaction. As a consequence, the deaf teachers experienced students as less motivated and a bit ignorant in class. Another finding which was revealed in the reflection phase was that there were several modality-specific aspects which were trained but not mentioned in the learning outcomes expressed in the curriculum. Thus, some skills which students developed were not paid attention to when the teachers rated their outcomes in the exams. The ensuing changes in the curriculum were made in order to cover more adequately what students learned in the courses and to include visual attention training. The new curriculum was first used with the cohort of students who start their STS education in the fall semester 2018.
In parallel with the changes in the curriculum, the project group decided to conduct a new sub-study on the new cohort of students, with an emphasis laid on modality-focused instruction. This paper builds on data from this new sub-study, which is described in the next section.
4 A Study on the Teaching of Modality-Specific Features
The whole teacher team, consisting of seven teachers, was involved in the planning and preparation of this sub-study. Its main focus was the question of how the instructors should teach modality-specific features to students. As preparation, the teachers read and discussed selected research articles on L2-signers, and attended a seminar with a researcher in the child-sign-language acquisition field to learn about the different phases of development in sign language as the L1 in children.
Initially, the project team intended to use processability theory (Pienemann 1998), which addresses how L2 learners acquire grammatical structures. However, as there are no studies that have identified stages for STS development and as teachers discussed whether modality was a factor lacking in this theory, the team decided not to use it. In a series of seminars, the teacher team instead constructed a “developmental ladder” describing the main focus of each level of teaching during two years of STS-instruction (Balkstam et al. 2018):
As illustrated in Figure 2, level 1 focuses on modality. This means that instruction initially should mainly train students to be familiar with modality-specific features. In the lesson plan for the first eight weeks of instruction (i.e. the first STS-course in the program), it was decided that the three first weeks (approximately 36 hours of in-class instruction) would mainly have such a focus. This phase covered different exercises, such as training to use face and body, learning about the space in front of the body, and training of visual attention. After the first three weeks, some lessons still had modality-specific training in focus, but instruction continued further into level 2.
The cohort of students was divided into three groups, each group consisting of approximately 10 students (in total, 30 students participated in the first weeks of instruction). 26 students were women and four were men, with a mean age of 23 years. Students either had no previous knowledge of STS, at all, or were early beginners.
17 lessons (1,5 hours each) from the whole period of eight weeks with a modality-specific focus were video-recorded with two cameras (one directed at the teacher and one at students), and the data amounted to 30 hours of recordings. Four teachers were involved in the teaching (they had different lessons with the groups, one at a time), of which three were deaf L1 signers (here called Nina, Jenny and Anders) and one, a hearing L2 signer (called Anna). After each lesson, the teachers made a reflection on how the teaching had gone, documented either in STS or written Swedish. Besides, students were asked to participate in a written interview after the first eight weeks of instruction in order to share how they had experienced the teaching and content.
Both STS and spoken Swedish were used in the teaching process. Primarily, explanations and shorter lectures were provided in spoken Swedish. In these cases, the hearing teacher herself spoke, and the deaf teachers used STS-interpreters. In the practical exercises, STS was primarily used by all teachers.
5 Modality-Focused Instruction
The video-recordings from the 17 lessons were analyzed with a focus on modality-specific instruction. In this section, the results of this analysis will be described and illustrated. The lessons possibly consisted of several exercises, each of which trained different modality features; it was not the case that one lesson trained one feature only. However, the exercises could also train several modality features simultaneously. For example, the training of visual attention could happen in tandem with training to use space or simultaneity. However in the following, the focus is on each of the four modality-specific characteristics in separate sections, although a given exercise may also have trained other features.
5.1 Visual Attention
As described above, visual attention is a fundamental feature in sign language communication. Hearing people use primarily auditive attention, for example, they call each other by their names when addressing a message or asking for attention. They may also react to sounds in the environment and look in a certain direction while speaking and listening. Thus in the sign language classes of this study, the training of visual attention was essential, both in specific exercises and as an underlying, constant training during all the lessons, particularly in the lessons with deaf L1 teachers (because it was possible to acoustically call for attention or use the voice with the hearing teachers). The deaf teachers in the study required that all students look at them before they started signing and that they all looked at each other when one student was signing. Deaf teachers also regularly used hand wavings to catch students’ attention. During the exercises, they switched the light on and off to signal students that they should stop the activity and look at them. An interesting fact is that in the previous sub-study described above, the researcher found that some of the deaf teachers used auditive attention strategies, such as hand-clapping or knocking at tables or walls, to get students' attention. Afterwards this was discussed in the teacher team, as is usual in action research processes, and the team decided to stop this behaviour because all agreed that students needed to train their visual attention in particular. Thus, in the data for this study, only visual attention-markers were used by deaf teachers.
Some exercises were, however, explicitly conducted in order to train students' visual attention and eye contact. Two of these exercises will be described more closely. The first one took place in the second lesson after the semester had started. The teacher, Nina, had an interpreter at her disposal, because this, was one of the first sessions, and students had just begun to learn STS. Nina explained that it was crucial to direct the eyes to the person in focus and that they would train such visual attention with the help of a small ball. The students and Nina stoof in a circle, and Nina explained that the one that was holding the ball should direct her (only female students were present on this occasion) eyes toward the other students and choose one of them. After that, she should raise her eyebrows as a signal to this student, and then throw the ball to her. This student should then do the same thing, and so on. The other students, who did not have the ball, were instructed to follow the student holding the ball, with their eyes, and switch to the new one once the ball was been thrown. After a while, Nina asked the students to add an eye blink before throwing the ball, and the exercise went on:
Figure 3: Training of Eye Contact Through Throwing a Ball
When all students had thrown the ball several times, Nina asked them to also move their arms in circles with the palm forward, while continuing making eye contact. This, however, did not work well: students started giggling, missing the ball, making mistakes and forgetting to use all the signals. In her reflections afterward, Nina concluded that she should not have added the last movement of the arm because students were not ready to control so many features simultaneously.
The second example of visual-attention training comes from Jenny’s class. The lesson was students' third. Jenny began with a lecture on visual attention, mediated through an STS interpreter, using a PowerPoint presentation. She explained the differences between aural and visual attention and the characteristics of STS visual attention. After the lecture, Jenny asked students to leave their chairs and stand together in the middle of the room. She asked them to walk around in the room, make eye contact with each other and sign hello. After a while, Jenny switched the light on and off, and students stopped walking around. Jenny then asked them to do the same thing, but instead approach each other from behind and tap each other's shoulder to get attention before signing hello:
Figure 4: Visual-Attention Training
This exercise was followed by a similar one in which students were instead asked to strike their hands on the other students’ arms, and to sign hello after getting eye contact.
In this exercise, students trained different ways to make contact with their interlocutors and to dare to touch each other to get attention. Jenny’s reflections from the lesson were that the exercises were essential to train visual attention and that students were not used to doing so in communication. She also noted that students quickly caught on to the switching of light to get attention and that in fact, they started using this measure themselves.
The examples given here illustrate a very different way to L2-teaching, compared to the teaching of other spoken languages. The exercises are not meant to train the language per se, but rather to train fundamental behaviours for the language to be used at all. And this is grounded in the fact that students were learning to express the language in the visual modality.
5.2 Iconicity
Iconicity in sign languages differs largely from iconicity in spoken languages, and several studies on M2-L2 acquisition have focused on this characteristic. There are disagreements about whether iconicity in sign languages facilitates their acquisition or not. For example, some researchers (e.g. Mayberry 2006) mention that it may be easier for learners to remember iconic signs because it is simple to reveal their meaning as they look like what they mean. Other researchers (e.g. Ortega & Morgan 2015) argue that learners perceive iconic signs as more accessible; therefore, they do not pay in-depth attention to them, and may perform them, making more phonological errors. However, regardless of whether iconicity facilitates the learning of a sign language or not for M2-L2 learners, it is an apparent characteristic that is more frequent and common in sign languages. Thus, it is also a prominent part of the content taught and was therefore focused on in several exercises in this study.
An example from teaching, focusing on iconicity comes from Anna’s lessons. Anna, a hearing L2 teacher, used spoken Swedish when she introduced topics, explained concepts or features, or had discussions with her students. During the exercises, however, students were required to use STS exclusively.
Anna informed her students that they would learn how to depict verbs, and asked them to think about activities or events, and how they should talk about them in STS. She mentioned that the signs they would use did not have to be established signs and that they did not have to sign in sentences but rather show what it might look like when they would handle an object or conduct an activity. In-class discussions revealed that students did not understand the purpose of depicting signs. They asked why it was not just to combine different lexical signs into sentences. Anna told them that this was the usual way in the visual-gestural modality and explained that depicting signs got their meanings in specific contexts. After that, one student suggested a sign that indicated how she held the handle of a shopping cart, and Anna asked the students to find out more activities that could be produced in the same way. Another student suggested the use of a rolling pin, and Anna agreed. She explained that in these cases, the context was essential because otherwise, it would be impossible to understand what the sign meant. After these clarifications, students continued discovering activities in which they used their hands in different ways.
This lesson was followed up by another exercise one week later. When the students arrived in the classroom, they found that Anna had put different objects on the tables: food boxes, bottles, bowls, jugs, kitchen utensils, and several other things. Anna walked from table to table and explained and showed that students handle the objects on the tables in pairs in different ways. While one student was to handle the real objects, the other, standing opposite, was to mirror his classmates' handling without using real objects. After a while, they switched roles.
Initially, students were confused, and Anna walked around and explained the exercise several times in Swedish. Finally, all the students stood opposite each other, pouring liquid in bowls, hanging up laundry, picking fruit, etc. (Figure 5). The students switched between their roles and between different tables, performing the different exercises. After a long while, Anna requested them to sit down and asked them what the exercise had to do with sign language:
5.3 Spatiality
As mentioned above, a signer mainly expresses the signs with hands and arms moving in front of the body, a place called the signing space. However, hearing beginners do initially not know that there is a signing space, and thus, they need to become conscious of it. Space is used in a range of ways, and at different linguistic levels, with different purposes. Thus, almost everything students in sign language classes learn is to use this space. However, there are exercises that more explicitly focus on particular parts of the space and how it should be used. As this study focuses on modality training in the first eight weeks of instruction, the examples described here come from lessons with an explicit focus on spatiality training for beginners.
In one of the students’ very first lessons, Nina, mediated through an STS-interpreter, told students that they would practice “thinking reversely”:
You will learn to think about how you read a sign and what it looks like from your perspective when you perform it yourself. Your signing, the direction, and the shape of your hands look different from the recipient’s perspective. When you perform the sign yourself, it is perceived in the opposite way by recipients. If I sign 'write', the movement is outward from my body, but you see it as I do a movement that goes towards you, and then you might want to sign 'write' with an inward movement because it is how you perceived it. But it is not so, and thus, you have to think reversely.
Nina turned half around so that she had her back partly to the class and showed how the sign looked from this perspective. She stressed that the exercise was aimed to train students to think reversely. Nina asked students to stand up in a circle in the classroom and started moving one hand in circles. Students imitate her. The student standing opposite Nina mirrored her and performed the sign with the wrong arm. Nina stopped and directed all the students’ attention to this case and explained that this was the moment when they should think reversely to produce the same movement and not just perform mirroring. Nina then divided the students so that they would work in pairs and, standing in front of each other, they were trained to make different movements with their hands, arms and legs that the other student was to create similarly:
This exercise continued on for about 30 minutes, and students switched pairs at times.
One week later, the deaf teacher Anders also taught the class to think about places and directions. He introduced an exercise in which students (working in pairs) would create their own simple crosswords, and then, without looking at each other's papers, one student would try to explain where the other student would start writing words, such as in the top right corner and continue downward, filling in letters in the boxes. All this would be explained entirely by using the signing space and, in other words, the student should point in the air to indicate where the respective classmate would write the words. Anders mentioned (mediated by an STS interpreter), using explicit arm movements:
My right is your right. My left is your left. My up is your up. My down is your down.
Anders repeated this several times, and also drew a square on the board, showing how he could illustrate, for example, the left corner using his hands, first showing this with his hands in front of the drawing at the board (Figure 7a), and thereafter, he turned around while still holding his hands in this constellation (Figure 7b):
Figures 7a and 7b: Showing Perception of Hands’ Placement from Signer’s and Recipients’ Perspectives, respectively.
This helped students to understand the different perception of places, directions, and signs from the signers’ and the addressees’ perspectives.
Another example of training to use space comes from Anna’s lesson. Here, students baked chocolate balls. In a quite similar way as in the exercises illustrated in the simultaneity-section below, students perform the exercise to bake chocolate balls fictitiously in groups. One student in turn (per group) did the baking, while the other two were watching, noticing hand shapes, directions, placement in the space of the baking cup, pearl sugar, refrigerator, etc. Students were trained to remember the process and created a visual story of what they were doing when baking the chocolate balls. They also had to remember where they had placed the cup, where they were to put the balls (refrigerator), and how they were to take them out again after they were finished.
Obviously, spatiality is another characteristic of sign languages which is trained in a way that is unlike other language instruction and which requires students to create topographic maps in their minds in order to use the language correctly. In short, students learn to express the language in a 3D-format rather than in a linear or sequential way.
5.4 Simultaneity
In sign languages, many processes happen in parallel. M2-L2 students not only need to learn to express what they want to say, using their hands and their arms, but also to add different facial features (”non-manuals”) simultaneously. This can be quite complex because students need to control many new features in parallel. While their hands often express lexical content, their faces often add grammatical features. For example, the sentence 'want coffee you' can be manually produced by the signer's hands, but it is the facial expressions that signal if this sentence is declarative or interrogative. Similarly, in a narrative of a hiking tour, it is the signer's facial expressions that indicate if it is a relaxed, joyful, or strenuous tour, i.e. her face adds adverbial content to the lexical signs produced by her hands. As mentioned above, simultaneity also includes the fact that signers can express two signs using two different hands simultaneously, but in the examples here, the focus lies on the simultaneity of manual signs and non-manuals.
Several exercises in the first weeks of STS instruction has simultaneity in focus through training students to combine manuals and non-manuals in different ways. Teacher Jenny had several exercises that covered such training sequences. For example, in her third lesson, students learned signs for animals, and thereafter, they learned that they could add different facial expressions to signal if it was a small or big animal, if the animal was tired or alert, etc. In this exercise students also learned that they could use small or large movements, which also signalled more than the mere lexical sign. One week later, Jenny expanded this exercise. The lesson began with a lecture, mediated through an STS interpreter. Jenny explained different parts in STS, and then, she focused on prosody. She showed how different parts of face and body interact and create STS’s prosody. So, if the signer signs 'happy' or 'angry', these feelings can be strengthened through his or her facial expressions. After that, Jenny had the class do pantomime exercises in order to train students to use their face and body in different ways. She mentioned that it was not the same as playing, but that it represented an essential part of the training in order to connect the use of face and body to signing STS. Students were asked one after another to stand in front of the class, pick up a small paper from a pile showing different animals, and perform the movement of these animals using their face and body. The other students guessed which animal the student was portraying. After that, they did the same exercise, which was then focused on feelings. Finally, students picked one animal and one feeling and performed these in combination. Figure 8 illustrates a student portraying a happy bird:
Figure 8: Training to Express Several Parts Simultaneously by Combining an Animal with a Feeling.
Some days later, Anna did a similar exercise with the same student group, but the point of departure was spoken Swedish. She wrote four words on the blackboard: senap ‘mustard’, ketchup, majonnäs ‘mayonnaise’, and ankskit ‘duck poop’. Anna explained that all these words can be expressed with a tone of voice expressing feelings. Students were asked to work in pairs and pronounce these four words to each other with different feelings added to their voices, for example, by pronouncing ketchup with a happy, angry or curious voice, and the interlocutor had to guess the feeling expressed. Students interrupted this exercise again and again, mostly giggling. One student said that it was not possible to take this exercise seriously. Anna underlined that it was essential and asked them to continue, which they did, trying their best to suppress their giggles.
After the exercise, students said that it actually was quite easy to perform feelings together with a word. The students were asked to do the exercise again, using their faces and bodies to add meaning to their utterances. Anna informed them that this was the same thing in STS, but that, instead using their voice, the words were expressed with their hands and the feelings with their faces and bodies. She showed students the sign equivalents for the Swedish words and asked them to exercise them in pairs again.
In her instruction, Anna departed from the language modality that students usually express themselves in, and used it as a bridge to STS. This contrastive method may have helped students to understand that the exercises (also those with Jenny), were not like playing, but important exercises to learn the new way to express visually what they would usually express in Swedish orally.
In the previous sections, four modality-specific features in sign languages have been separated in order to illustrate the complexity of features that M2-L2 learners have to learn in order to acquire a sign language. However, in natural communication, these features occur simultaneously. In one of the final exercises with a particular focus on modality training, Anna showed a narrative in STS, using a projector. In the move, she added circles, crosses and arrows to point out different features in the signing. Then, the move stopped, but the symbols lasted. Anna pointed and told students that this looks like a map and that they had to remember several phenomena simultaneously because in sign languages, iconicity, simultaneity, and spatiality occur simultaneously.
6 Students’ Experiences
After having described the modality-specific training planned and conducted by the teachers, we will now focus on students’ experiences. When conducting research on L2 signers’ learning or sign language L2 pedagogy, students' experiences are rarely examined (e.g. McKee & McKee 1992). In our UTL2 project, we also wanted to include students’ perspectives, and therefore, several interviews were carried out. In this sub-study, written interviews were conducted with 19 of the 30 students who participated in the exercises described above. It was of primary interest how they experienced the modality-focused exercises.
In one of the questions, students were asked to describe how they experienced the exercises that trained them to use face and body. The answers revealed that they perceived it as a strange experience: “It was extremely difficult! It’s something brand new!”. Below, further answers from students are exemplified:
Initially, it feels strange
It never feels really comfortable, but you understand that is precisely why the exercises are done, and gradually, you become more accustomed to expressing yourself in this way.
It’s fun, but hard – you usually don’t express yourself in this way.
We have learned more about our own body language and mimicry and got to develop it.
It has been good and fun exercises like imitating each other’s movements and animals.
At first, we did not understand why we should do these exercises, but in retrospect, we see how important they were.
A little contradictory sometimes - to play and make charades and then be told that sign language is not charades.
Taken together, students learned a new way to express language that they had initially experienced as unfamiliar, but gradually, they became more and more comfortable with the use of face and body.
As mentioned above, L2 signers are not initially conscious that there is a “signing space” in front of their bodies. Therefore, another question focused on the exercises that trained students to use this space. Their answers revealed that this was also experienced as difficult and new:
It has been difficult, and it takes time to make it feel normal.
At first, we did not know how much space to use and that we should stand still.
We have been taught that there is a space in front of us that can be used and therefore we should use it, too.
The most important thing was to learn how to use references in the space and how to deploy different entities.
Baking chocolate balls with Anna and watching “Tuffa Viktor” and “Uttern Otto” was instructive.
It’s fun to create images in my head and put things in the space.
It was good to learn that it should be comfortable when using the space.
It is important to learn that we start from the signer’s own perspective when placing things or pointing in the space.
One of the most important insights that students took from the training to use the space in front of them can be summarized as follows: they understood that STS are not expressed in a linear and sequential way as in spoken Swedish, but rather in a spatial and simultaneous way, and that they needed to build their STS utterances more on what they could perceive with their eyes than on how words are combined into sentences.
However, students did not always understand why they should perform the different exercises. Eight students said that they did not understand their purpose, at all. As one student put it:
I understood what we were going to do in the majority of the exercises, but did not understand why we did as we did. There was a little too much focus on how to hold things and how to move.
Another student mentioned that, in a later phase of the instruction (i.e. days or even weeks later), they often came to realize why they had done the exercises:
In retrospect, I have understood the purpose and could link everything together.
Seven students mentioned that initially, they did not understand the purpose of different exercises, but that, after a while, they came into insight, at least in the final phase of the lesson, as one student describes:
The experience from all the lessons we have had is that you know that at least at the end of the lesson, you get the whole or a small explanation that makes you understand why.
The remaining four students stated that they had understood the purpose at once.
Overall, students mentioned some aspects that were particularly difficult in the learning of STS. These were simultaneity, using the space adequately, knowing when their eyebrows should be raised or lowered (i.e., non-manuals), negations, and fingerspelling.
7 Discussion
In this paper, a range of examples from STS instruction have been described, focusing on visual-gestural modality. One might get the impression that initial STS-teaching at the university is highly focused on non-linguistic features, realised through pantomimic exercises. This, however, is not the case. Although the first three weeks of instruction had such a focus, students also learned lexical signs, numbers and fingerspelling. And after the first three weeks, there remained some modality-focused lessons, while more lessons were about grammar and structure, as well as teaching students to have simple conversations in STS.
As mentioned above, the teacher team consisted of five deaf teachers, who have STS as their L1, and two hearing teachers one of whom has STS as her L2. Previous studies in the UTL2 project have revealed that teachers contributed to the instruction with different important elements (Holmström 2018a, 2019). Deaf teachers generally have great skills and knowledge of the language, and students tend to trust them more regarding the signs and sentences that need to be performed. In our study, students are forced to use STS with them, and they were trained to express themselves in different ways in order to communicate with their deaf teachers. They learned essential visual behaviour from them and experienced them as STS role models. The L2 teacher, in turn, had learned STS as a young adult and knew many of the difficulties hearing people meet with when learning a sign language. She was also able to compare students’ L1 with STS and to explain important features and discuss them with students. The students found it easier to ask questions and to get descriptions of different parts of STS when meeting the L2 teacher. In other institutions inside and outside Sweden, this has not always been the preferred way of teaching. Oftentimes, the opinion is expressed that in STS classes, one should just sign and not use any spoken language, at all. Some studies in general second-language learning support such a view, while others do not (e.g. Ellis 2012). In the UTL2 project, we have found that it is facilitative to have a combination of lessons with STS only and those in which spoken language occurs in instructions, lectures, and explanations. Therefore, in several of the exercises described in this paper, the deaf teachers had an STS interpreter at their disposal. This was most usual in the first weeks of instruction, and the interpreters did not interpret every single word; for example, they did not do any interpretation when students performed their exercises in pairs.
Students mentioned that they did not always understand the purpose of the exercises, and when there are no interpreters at hand, as in a previous study, the pace is even slower, and students are even more confused about what they are expected to do. This also indicates that teachers need to be more explicit in their instructions and explain the purpose of the exercises even better. This is something to take into account when making further improvements to the courses.
Another aspect which needs to be examined and developed further is the question of how interpreters can be employed best by deaf teachers. Our study revealed that they are not conscious of what the interpreters really mediate. For example, in a given situation, Anders tried to joke with students, but failed, and implied that the interpreter might have misinterpreted what he had said. But in fact, the interpreter told the researcher (when consulted during the analysis) that she had been confused and not realized that it was a joke. Likewise, Jenny realised that she had meant the interpreter to be silent in some cases when they trained visual attention, but she was not sure if the interpreter had mediated what she tried to tell students only visually because she had not collaborated with the interpreter in advance.
The teaching method which concentrates particularly on modality-specific features that have been in the focus in this study is not a brand new method in the actual context. The teachers had previously trained students in different modality-specific features, but not to the same extent, and not in such a conscious way as was the case here. The decision to give students time to understand and train the use of face and body to express language, the process to learn how to transfer actions from the reality into STS handshapes and signs, and the large training of visual attention initially led to the situation that students not had learned enough lexical signs to express themselves in STS sentences. On the other hand, students were more comfortable using face and body, improvising, seeing connections between places in the space and handshapes in signs, with the real world, and using visual attention strategies. And when the instruction went further during the first year, they quickly increased their vocabulary and ability to express sentences in STS, and thus picked up what they had not initially acquired.
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Author:
Ingela Holmström, PhD
Associate Professor
Stockholm University
Department of Linguistics
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden
E-mail: ingela.holmstrom@ling.su.se
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(1) In STS, adverbial content is expressed primarily through facial expressions (Section 5.4).
(2) The use of the right or left hand has no meaning in STS, but rather it is about which side a sign is performed on. If the signer is right-handed and wants to perform the sign for ‘power’, she starts the sign on her chest’s opposite side. If the signer is left-handed, she also starts the sign from her opposite side. This is often difficult for STS beginners to understand. However, right and left can be important in other contexts, for example, when telling where things are located. Then the recipient must perceive that, for example, a car is parked at the right side of the signer (Section 5.3).