Deaf People Education: crossing linguistic borders through e-Learning

Introduced by Maria Tagarelli De Monte

May 22nd, 2010 – Valletta, Malta

LREC 2010 Workshops Supporting eLearning with Language Resources and Semantic data

Maria Tagarelli De Monte and Giuseppe Nuccetelli

Istituto Statale per Sordi di Roma, Italy

Roadmap

Deaf people’s linguistic competences Why eLearning? The DEAL experience Issues in Deaf people e-education Conclusions

Roadmap

Deaf people’s linguistic competences Why eLearning? The DEAL experience Issues in Deaf people e-education Conclusions

Linguistic competences in prelingual Deaf people

Development of writing abilities – sinergy among Hearing Speech Writing Reading

Linguistic competences in prelingual Deaf people

Development of writing abilities – sinergy among Hearing Speech Writing Reading

Tipical problems in language production (written) Free morphology Clitic pronouns Prepositions Articles

Sign Language has proven to be an excellent support to language development

Developing Educational Methodologies Using Sign Language

Roadmap

Deaf people’s linguistic competences Why eLearning? The DEAL experience Issues in Deaf people e-education Conclusions

User Generated Content (Web 2.0)possibility for deaf people to aggregate in online

communities where to use both Video and Textual chat

Deafness and Technology: Internet

User Generated Content (Web 2.0)possibility for deaf people to aggregate in online

communities where to use both Video and Textual chat

Use of written language in informal contexts

Deafness and Technology: Internet

User Generated Content (Web 2.0)possibility for deaf people to aggregate in online

communities where to use both Video and Textual chat

Use of written language in informal contexts

+ Language acquisition (full immersion)

Deafness and Technology: Internet

e-Learning

Roadmap

Deaf people’s linguistic competences Why eLearning? The DEAL experience Issues in Deaf people e-education Conclusions

The DEAL experience: a mosaic of codes

Catalan Sign Language

Austrian Sign Language Italian

Sign Language

2006 - 2008

Each Unit contains one way supports: Introductive videos in SL explaining the unit

activities An animated reference story (subtitled) upon which

educational activities are developed Dialogue transcription giving learners the possibility

to open lexical or grammatical micro-windows in SL Exercises to improve learners lexical and

grammatical knowledge

The DEAL experience: educational unit’s structure

Introductive videos in SL explaining the unit activities

The DEAL experienceEducational Units - examples

The DEAL experienceEducational Units - examples

An animated reference story (subtitled) upon which educational activities are developed

Dialogue transcription giving learners the possibility to open lexical or grammatical micro-windows in SL

The DEAL experienceEducational Units - examples

Exercises to improve learners lexical and grammatical knowledge

The DEAL experienceEducational Units - examples

Bidirectional tools: Interactive teaching activities where the tutors work

with the students starting from their questions and their doubts in the educational system.

Videoconference possibility among peers and with tutors

Forum

Sign Language is used at several interaction levels: Interaction among peers Interaction with teachers

The DEAL experience: educational unit’s structure

The DEAL experienceEducational Units - examples

Videoconference possibility among peers and with tutors

Platform evalutation

When:June 2008

Where: Istituto Statale per Sordi di Roma (Italy) on Spanish Course

Who: 8 deaf teenagers, 1 spanish teacher, 1 interpreter (+2 researchers)

How: blended learning (teacher and interpreter in class)

The DEAL experience: evaluation results

PROS educational methodology use of videoconferencing system use of explanatory windows in SL

CONS interface

How does the platform works? Not clear Forum doesn’t give any immediate feedback on questions Sign Language windows considered too small

administration of user visual skills

Roadmap

Deaf people’s linguistic competences Why eLearning? The DEAL experience Issues in Deaf people e-education Conclusions

In deaf people code complexity is managed by the only sense of sight

Loss of multimediality(video, images, text, sound)

Visual skills administration in Deaf People education

Visual skills administration in Deaf People education

Management of Space and Time

All “learning objects” must be positioned in order to allow learner to return to the selected resource when needed

Screen Space: all visual elements should be highly visible, easy to decode, and giving good navigational cues

A proper management of screen space and time will impact the emerging relationship between learners and teachers and the construction of the learning environment

Great use of video and visual communication tools, makes data transmission quality one of the main issues of e-learning platforms for the deaf.

Real-time online video communication such as video-chat for sign language or lip movement are strongly affected by the efficiency of data transmission, as this should be as close as possible to real people movements.

The importance of an efficient data transmission

Roadmap

Deaf people’s linguistic competences Why eLearning? The DEAL experience Issues in Deaf people e-education Conclusions

Designing efficient eLearning environments for the Deaf

Defining the role of sign language in the variety of possible codes

Regulating Interaction Space and Time

Thank you for your attention!!

mariatdemonte@istitutosordiroma.itIstituto Statale per Sordi di Roma

Rome – Italy

www.istitutosordiroma.itwww.deal-leonardo.eu

www.toi.deal-leonardo.euwww.istc.cnr.it/visel