Give me a Sign 2 Erasmus Project

Project Title

Give me a Sign 2

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Access for disadvantaged

Project Summary

On the contrary to popular opinion, sign language is not universal, and in fact each community has naturally and spontaneously created and developed its own sign language over the years. There is a system of international signs which enables deaf people to communicate at international meetings and conferences, but this is not in any way a natural language and is rather a convention of signs in order to summarise. For these reasons, fluid international communication between deaf people requires the learning of foreign sign languages, in exactly the same way as oral languages. However, in spite of the several initiatives put in place by the European Commission in order to promote multilingualism in Europe, little or nothing has been produced in terms of projects to create teaching and learning materials which might make this idea of multilingualism accessible to the deaf communities across Europe and, indeed, across the world. As a result, opportunities to learn foreign sign languages are severely limited when they exist at all, which therefore represents a significant obstacle to transnational communication between deaf people and, in turn, a clear limitation to their rights of citizenship, most obviously as far as the free circulation of citizens in Europe is concerned.
With this in mind, the GMAS2 project, based on the original Give Me A Sign project which produced research into the language learning needs of the deaf (see www.givemeasign.site), aims to produce a digital learning platform containing real learning materials to enable deaf people to learn 5 foreign sign languages, at A1 and A2 levels (Portuguese, Turkish, Swedish, Austrian and British), created in accordance with the indicators described in ProSign (Sign Languages and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). These materials include detailed, lesson-by-lesson curricula, a cluster of strategically important face-to-face learning materials and online learning materials, a vocabulary resource and a teachers’ guide based on the experiences obtained by testing everything we produce with groups of deaf learners in each country, learning one or more foreign sign languages via internet/video-powered distance learning courses.
In this sense, by the end of the project something entirely new will have been established for the first time in history: it will have become possible to learn a foreign sign language directly through signs, without resorting to the additional burden of learning the written language, which is so often different from the sign language of the country (Austria, for example), and the deaf community in these countries will have become aware of the enormous advantages of this kind of learning. These include the chance to learn a new skill (a foreign sign language) and thus gain a new qualification to enhance their CV, plus the resulting opportunity to take part in VET mobility, which has been impracticable up to now because of the communication problem, the potential increase in employability and in attractiveness to employers given their new profile, in addition to socially important factors such as the chance to visit another country, often considered too difficult because of the communication barrier, the chance to make new friends in other deaf communities across Europe and to share ideas with them and, in short, the chance to reduce the risk of isolation which exists because these issues have never before been seriously addressed. It will also lead to a new profession: the foreign sign language teacher.
We hope that this project will represent the turning point for deaf communities in Europe, that the GMAS2 digital learning platform will become the benchmark for foreign sign language learning in Europe and the start of a new era for the deaf, in which they finally begin to gain access to equal opportunities in learning and qualification.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 178796 Eur

Project Coordinator

Centro Europeu de Línguas & Country: PT

Project Partners

• Mavi Pencere Ozel Egitim Dernegi
• Federação Portuguesa das Associações de Surdos (FPAS)
• MegaVega
• Europeiskt Teckenspråkcenter