La didactique de la langue des signes française :

Abstract

This article offers some insights into which branch of study French sign language and its associated didactics should properly belong to. Our basic premise is that the role of any didactics is to observe teaching phenomena and then construct definitions which can describe them. We shall begin by showing how, despite resistance, the language has become an object of study in universities both as a language taught and a teaching language. Sign language, like the idea of a specifically deaf culture, has had a troubled history in France. Our aim here is not to dwell on the particularities of deaf culture (shared experience, belonging to a peer group, habitus, communication strategies, adapting to life in a hearing society etc.), but we will nevertheless keep in mind that language and culture are inseparable when discussing language teaching. French sign language or ‘language for the deaf’ was denied legitimacy for over a century. It was seen for a long time as a very restricted code, no more than a form of mimicry, which could not be counted as a language. Most notable was the general refusal, from 1880 on, to use the visual resources of sign language in teaching deaf pupils. The issues around teaching the deaf were systematically reduced to the technical question of improving oral French. This focus on oral production and lip-reading meant that little attention was given to what was actually taught, or to teacher-pupil interaction. The resulting underlying confusion has persisted, as Mottez puts it: ‘since deafness was a pathology, their language would also be one’ (Mottez, 1979, in Benvenuto, 2006, p. 252). This is why the recognition of FSL as one of the languages of France in its own right in the early 21st century was such a remarkable advance. It was only in the 1960s and 70s that linguists such as Stokoe and Markowicz (Gallaudet College, Washington DC, USA) began the formal study of sign language gestures. In their wake, a French researcher named Mottez, a sociologist at the Centre des Mouvements sociaux; Centre for social movements began to take an interest in the deaf community, closely followed by Cuxac, a linguist in France, and Grosjean a psycholinguist in Switzerland. So it was not until the mid-seventies, with the ‘deaf awakening’, that the question of which language to use when teaching deaf children could be raised or that any other viewpoint than the dominant one for more than a century could be heard: the idea that a genuine pedagogical relationship can be established with people who ‘talk differently’, who wish to be understood and who want to learn using a language that reflects their visual mode of thinking. We should thus note that the initial leverage for a different education for deaf pupils encouraging bilingualism came from research by linguists, who were instrumental in developing associative movements like 2LPE (Deux Langues Pour une Education ;Two languages for one education). Finally, after some fifteen years (1975-90) of discoveries, high hopes and disappointments, this language, the reflection of deaf peoples’ way of thinking, would be given official recognition in France. During that time, researchers were working alongside deaf people towards the same goals (Geffroy, 2015; Mato, 2017). Thanks to the combined toolkits of historians, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists and ethnologists, an authentically new, more attentive way of looking at FSL users emerged over thirty years. FSL was initially introduced into French university curricula as a somewhat ‘exotic’ subject, which actually became increasingly popular. The first national diploma aimed directly at signing deaf people thus appeared in 2004 as a Continuous Education course at Paris 8 University. This innovation led to a great deal of reflection about possible didactics of FSL, which had so far been given little attention, whether by researchers, deaf or hearing teachers. It must be said that the complex and hitherto unknown situation of French deaf community and their language was indeed a challenge to describe: how could one analyse a language in the absence of any linguistic framework; how could one record it, keep some trace of it? How could people who had been ignored and reduced to silence for so many years be questioned about it? The study of FSL and its speakers poses both a scientific challenge and an interesting epistemological issue in that it requires us to adjust, if not modify, some deceptively obvious concepts. In particular, ‘saying by showing’ is inherent to deafness (Cuxac, 2000), and this demonstrative dimension automatically finds its way into any pedagogical interaction led by deaf teachers (Leroy 2010), since a feature of the deaf experience is the practical ability to produce meaning by visual and gestural means, using their own specific proprioceptive cues. Furthermore, the question of representativity seems to us a crucial one for this population. The category ‘hearing impaired’ does exist, but is generally insufficiently differentiated: the figures do not tell us who speaks sign language or not, nor with what degree of skill, nor anything about educational experience etc. And yet such details are essential if we are to assess without bias not only the academic skills but also the socialisation and self-esteem opportunities that each particular educational arrangement offers to a deaf child. All this underlines how unfortunate it would be to ignore the vision that a didactics specific to sign language could provide, whilst playing a support role in educational choices based on objective criteria rather than emotional ones. Indeed, the crucial importance of educational choices for deaf pupils and the atypical way FSL is transmitted both argue cogently for the existence of its own specific didactics, articulated around several lines of study: acquisitional, cognitive, linguistic, pedagogical... In conclusion, we wish to qualify our comments slightly, since the questions raised clearly cannot all be properly dealt with by a didactics of sign-language alone. An international, cross-disciplinary approach is required, involving collaboration with Deaf Studies (or Disabilities Studies) programs in other countries, in order to examine together the ways in which the use of a visual-gestural language can contribute to language-teaching didactics generally and, more widely, to the didactics of other academic subjects. Given the strong links that exist between deaf languages in each country, bringing their didactics together would be beneficial for a more distanced approach to deafness, while favouring the emergence of new ways of teaching [transl. by Karen Meschia].

Keywords

• bilingualism
• sign language
• FSL
• deafness
• hearing impairment
• education