How monks helped invent sign language

      For millennia people with hearing impairments encountered marginalization because it was believed that language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, asserted that “Men that are deaf are in all cases also dumb.” Under Roman law people who were born deaf were denied the right to sign a will as they were “presumed to understand nothing; because it is not possible that they have been able to learn to read or write.”

      Pushback against such ideas began in the 16th-century, with the creation of the first formal sign language for the hearing impaired, by Pedro Ponce de León, a Spanish Benedictine monk. His idea to use sign language was not a completely new one. Native Americans used hand gestures to communicate with other tribes and to facilitate trade with Europeans. Benedictine monks had used them to convey messages during their daily periods of silence. Inspired by the latter practice, Ponce de León adapted the gestures used in his monastery to create a method for teaching the deaf to communicate, paving the way for systems now used all over the world.

      Building on Ponce de León’s work, another Spanish cleric and linguist, Juan Pablo Bonet, proposed that deaf people learn to pronounce words and progressively construct meaningful phrases. Bonet’s approach combined oralism – using sounds to communicate – with sign language. The system had its challenges, especially when learning the words for abstract terms, or intangible forms such as conjunctions like “for,” “nor,” or “yet.”

      In 1755 the French Catholic priest Charles-Michel de l’Épée established a more comprehensive method for educating the deaf, which culminated in the founding of the first public school for deaf children, in Paris. Students came to the institute from all over France, bringing signs they had used to communicate with at home. Insistent that sign language needed to be a complete language, his system was complex enough to express prepositions, conjunctions, and other grammatical elements.

      Épée’s standardized sign language quickly spread across Europe and to the United States. In 1814 Thomas Gallaudet went to France to learn Épée’s language system. Three years later, Gallaudet established the American School for the Deaf in his hometown in Connecticut. Students from across the United States attended, and they brought signs they used to communicate with at home.American Sign Language became a combination of these signs and those from French Sign Language.

      Thanks to the development of formal sign languages, people with hearing impairment can access spoken language in all its variety. The world’s many modern signing systems have different rules for pronunciation, word order, and grammar. New visual languages can even express regional accents to reflect the complexity and richness of local speech.

(Ines Anton Rayas. www.nationalgeographic.com. 28.05.2019. Adaptado)

     In order for collection of sentences and utterances to succed effectively, the discourse needs to be organised or conducted in such a way that it will be successful. In written English this calls for both coherence and cohesion. For a text to be coherent, it needs to be in the right order. (…)

      No matter how coherent a text is, however, it will not work unless it has internal cohesion. The elements in that text must cohere or stick to each other successfully to help us navigate our way around the stretch of discourse. One way of achieving this is through lexical cohesion, and a way of ensuring lexical cohesion is through the repetition of words and phrases. (…) We can also use interrelated words and meanings to bind a text together (…)

      Another similar cohesive technique is that of substitution, using a phrase to refer to something we have already written. (…) Writers also use linkers such as and, also, moreover (…)

      These features are also present in spoken language, which also shows many examples of ellipsis (where words from a written-grammar version of an utterance are left out without compromising the meaning of what is said). (…)

                      (Harmer, J. The practice of English language teaching. 2007. Adapted)

      There is a danger in paying too much attention to learners’ errors. While errors indeed reveal a system at work, the classroom language teacher can become so preoccupied ________ noticing errors that the correct utterances in the second language go unnoticed. In our observation and analysis of errors – for all that they do reveal about the learner – we must beware of placing too much attention on errors and not lose sight of the value of positive reinforcement of clearly expressed language that is a product of the learner’s progress of development. While the diminishing of errors is an important criterion ______ increasing language proficiency, the ultimate goal of second language learning is the attainment of communicative fluency.

      Another inadequacy in error analysis is an overemphasis on production data. Language is speaking and listening, writing and reading. The comprehension of language is as important as production. It so happens that production lends itself to analysis and thus becomes the prey of researchers, __________ comprehension data is equally important in developing an understanding of the process of SLA.

               (Brown, D. H. Principles of language learning and teaching. 2000. Adapted)

Read the two cartoons and answer questions.

      Classes which are arranged in a circle make quite a strong statement about what the teacher and the students believe in. With all the people in the room sitting in a circle, there is a far greater feeling of equality than when the teacher stays out at the front. This may not be quite so true of the horseshoe shape, where the teacher is often located in a commanding position, but, even here, the rigidity that comes with orderly rows, for example, is lessened.

      With the horseshoe and circle seating, the classroom is a more intimate place and the potential for students to share feelings and information through talking, eye contact or expressive body movements (eyebrow-raising, shouldershrugging, etc.) is far greater than when they are sitting in rows.

                                      (Harmer, J. The practice of English language teaching. 2007)

Read text 4 and answer questions 23 and 24.

TEXT 4

The sense of individuality and nationalism that has been borne from the diversity of ethnicities and traditions in Brazil is extremely strong; people take great pride in the uniqueness of their culture. The idea of ‘Brazilianism,’ which examines Brazil’s powerful history and how its distinct communities have come together to form a cohesive and unified nation, is now being offered at the university level as a subject of study. Cultivated partially by decades of unfavourable sentiment directed at different times towards the Portuguese, Spanish, British and Americans, the Brazilian identity is also defined to a certain extent by its anti-imperialist views.

The English language specifically has long been denied special consideration in Brazilian politics, policy and education due in part to the association between the language and the notion of cultural imperialism; generations of Brazilians have prospered without knowledge of the language and many in the country associate English with the United States and its role in the military regime from the 1960s to the 1980s. Due to this and the diversity of Brazilian history and the Brazilian people, it has been important not to refer to English as a second language - of which many exist in the form of indigenous languages – but as one of many foreign languages. Examples of the democratisation of language is exemplified by the fact that seven foreign languages are offered to middle schoolers in Sao Paulo as well as the historical role of Spanish and French as the foreign languages of choice. Our research has shown that the popular sentiment towards English is slowly changing, especially with the new generation of citizens that has no experience with the former dictatorship and an awareness of the increasingly globalised knowledge economy, of which Brazil is an important part.

https://ei.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/latin-america-research/English%20in%20Brazil.pdf

Access on August 18th, 2018

Read text 3 and answer questions 19, 20 and 21.

TEXT 3

In Chloe Snow`s diary: confessions of a high school disaster, author Emma Chastain uses diary entries to tell the story of 14-year-old Chloe Snow. Read the following excerpt from the book.

Thursday, August 27

After dinner, Dad and I watched Midnight in Paris. The point of the movie is, everyone idealizes the past, not realizing that their own era is pretty great and will be idealized by future generations. After it was over, I said, “I still think I’d be happier in the Jazz Age,” and Dad said, “You wouldn’t last five minutes without your phone,” which doesn’t make sense, because if I were born back then, I wouldn`t know about smartphones, so I couldn’t miss them, which I said, thereby winning the argument. For dessert, Dad had whiskey, and I had a lemon Italian ice, which I flipped over so I could eat the mushy super-sweet part first.

(Chastain, E. Chloe Snow’s diary: confessions of a High School disaster. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. p.17)