The complex intercultural activity of teaching/learning to read and write in a foreign language clearly involves a reciprocal cultural exchange. While trying to get students to efficiently learn the language in question, namely English, the teacher adapts to her pupils’ culture and communication mode: in this case LIS or Italian Sign Language. This paper attempts to demonstrate the complex process of developing a corpus for analysis of selected foreign language classroom exchanges. Here our emphasis is on face-to-face communication: what is imparted to the students by the teacher in Italian, how this information is transmitted or filtered by the LIS interpreter, what information the students eventually receive and how they react to it. A particular example of classroom activity has been filmed, transcribed and analysed from the points of view of successful communication, on the one hand, and failure or breakdown of exchange, on the other.
@inproceedings{ochse:04013:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Ochse, Elana},
title = {A language via two others: learning {English} through {LIS}},
pages = {68--74},
editor = {Streiter, Oliver and Vettori, Chiara},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2004} Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: From {SignWriting} to Image Processing. Information techniques and their implications for teaching, documentation and communication},
maintitle = {4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2004)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Lisbon, Portugal},
day = {30},
month = may,
year = {2004},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/04013.pdf}
}