You are going to listen to Jay talking about a special sign language for babies that her son Benen used when he was little.

Transcription

1 Task 1 Lead-in Discuss the questions below: 1. Does your country have a sign language? 2. If so, who uses it? 3. Have you seen anyone using it a. in real life b. on television or on the internet? 4. Did you find it easy to understand? 5. Do you know any of the signs? Task 2 Listening for gist You are going to listen to Jay talking about a special sign language for babies that her son Benen used when he was little. Listen and circle the correct answers to the questions. 1. What is the name of the language that Jay chose? a. Sing and Sign b. Sign and Sing c. Makaton 2. Is it the same as British Sign Language? a. Yes b. No 3. What songs are used with the sign language? a. pop songs b. songs from musicals c. nursery rhymes 4. Did Benen start signing when he was four months old? a. Yes b. No 5. What did signing help the baby with? a. intuition b. frustration c. imagination 6. Name two feelings which are included in the sign language course: a.... b Page 1 of 6

2 Task 3 Listening for detail Listen again to the first 50 seconds. Can you make the signs for: 1. milk 2. drink? Task 4 Speaking Work in pairs on the following questions: 1. What other words/concepts could be essential to a baby or a child with special needs? 2. Choose three and invent signs for them. Can the other pairs/groups guess what the signs mean? Task 5 Features of spoken English In the recording, there are some interesting examples of how speech is different from writing. Disfluency Speakers are not fluent. They hesitate, make false starts, repeat words or syllables and use fillers such as uh, erm, mmm, which are not words but which give them time to think about what they are saying. They may also use these sounds to give themselves the opportunity to correct a mistake they have made. Co-operative overlap The listener speaks at the same time as the main speaker to support or agree with what he/she is saying. Redundant speech More words than necessary are used to convey an idea. By repeating words or ideas the speaker may be trying to reduce the chance of being misinterpreted. Listen to the recording again. Underline and label these features D, C or R in the transcript. Now work with a different partner from in task 4. Explain why the three signs you chose are important. Listen for any of the features above during your conversation. Task 6 Follow-up Think of a nursery rhyme from your country that you could use with signs. Invent suitable signs, practise it with the signs, and then sing it to your group/class. Ask them what they understood. How intuitive are the signs that you have invented? Page 2 of 6

3 Teaching notes and key Level: upper-intermediate (B2). Timing: Tasks 1-5: between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on whether or not you use the YouTube videos. Task 6 (follow-up): about 40 minutes. Preparation The accompanying authentic audio recording can be downloaded from (Quick search: 19145). It lasts just over three minutes. Both speakers are British. There are links to YouTube videos to accompany tasks 1 and 4, but these are additional rather than central to the activities. Transcript J: and we did baby sign language, which went really well. L: Oh, right. J: I really liked that. L: What what does that involve? J: Erm it well we went to there were different programmes I think, around the UK, but we went to one called Sing and Sign and erm it s very simple signs. It s not British Sign Language. It s more similar to Makaton, which they use with children with special needs L: Oh, OK. J: so it s very simple signs erm so and things which are quite, sort of intuitive so, for milk, you sort of do the action of milking a cow, or erm and then drink is, you, you lift your hand to your mouth as if you re drinking erm so it s all quite intuitive, and you just basically sing songs to the tune of normal nursery rhymes that most mothers ll know anyway but they just change the words to incorporate words which you can sign. J: And so you just er I think he started when he was about four months old, which is quite young, actually L: Gosh! J: (laughs) yeah. He didn t start signing. That s when he started going to the classes erm but then I think he started doing his first signs before he was one he started asking for milk with the sign erm and then he he was really had a lot of signs Page 3 of 6

4 Baby sign language and it was just, it wasn t for a long time, but, it just bridged the gap between him thinking, I know what I want. How do I tell my mum? and him being able to actually come up with the words. J: And so I think it really helped with the frustration J: side of things, because if he wanted something, he could tell me what he wanted, and that, you know imagine being somewhere where there was no way that you could explain to somebody what you want you know what you want, but you can t explain it to somebody. J: It must be so frustrating, and then frustrating for the person who s trying to understand you as well. J: And I think just eliminating all that frustration that was a really a really positive thing erm He s he s pretty calm now. He doesn t really have tantrums and J: erm and I think I attribute at least some of that to the fact that he s been able to communicate what he wanted J: and sometimes how he felt as well. They erm they have signs for sad, and happy, and all of that as well J: so and, plus, it s just a nice thing to do, you know to go to a class. L: Yeah, fun, yeah. J: It s nice to do a class erm and yeah, you get a dictionary, and he s got DVDs which we still watch now, even though he doesn t have a he doesn t do any signs now. He s still quite expressive, actually, I ve noticed, with his body language, when he s talking, which is, maybe er something to do with it, but erm he still enjoys watching the programmes and I think he still gets things out of them, so J: Yeah, I think that was a brilliant thing to do. I actually found it first on YouTube. I think somebody had just sent me a link, or you know, I d seen it in a somewhere on a page a Google page, or something. Erm and there s a video online of a kid signing what he what she wants to eat, and she s quite small, I think, as well, so I just thought, Wow! Amazing! L: Aah. J: So, yeah we got on to that. I think it was a really good thing Page 4 of 6

5 Task 1 Lead-in If you have internet access in class, you could watch a YouTube video on British sign language for beginners, such as this one (available at the time of writing): Task 2 Listening for gist Answers: 1. a; 2. b; 3. c; 4. b; 5. b; 6. sad and happy. Task 3 Listening for detail Answers: (see transcript for descriptions of signs). Task 4 Speaking Other useful words/concepts could include: eat, toilet, it hurts, sleep, angry, Mummy, Daddy. Again, if you have internet access, you could watch a YouTube video of Sing and Sign baby sign language. Make sure you use a genuine Sing and Sign one, such as this one (available at the time of writing): Task 5 Features of spoken English Disfluency is highlighted in pink, co-operative overlap in purple and redundant speech in blue. J: and we did baby sign language, which went really well. L: Oh, right. J: I really liked that. L: What what does that involve? J: Erm it well we went to there were different programmes I think, around the UK, but we went to one called Sing and Sign and erm it s very simple signs. It s not British Sign Language. It s more similar to Makaton, which they use with children with special needs L: Oh, OK. J: so it s very simple signs erm so and things which are quite, sort of intuitive so, for milk, you sort of do the action of milking a cow, or erm and then drink is, you, you lift your hand to your mouth as if you re drinking erm so it s all quite intuitive, and you just basically sing songs to the tune of normal nursery rhymes that most mothers ll know anyway but they just change the words to incorporate words which you can sign. J: And so you just er I think he started when he was about four months old, which is quite young, actually L: Gosh! J: (laughs) yeah. He didn t start signing. That s when he started going to the classes Page 5 of 6

6 erm but then I think he started doing his first signs before he was one he started asking for milk with the sign erm and then he he was really had a lot of signs and it was just, it wasn t for a long time, but, it just bridged the gap between him thinking, I know what I want. How do I tell my mum? and him being able to actually come up with the words. J: And so I think it really helped with the frustration J: side of things, because if he wanted something, he could tell me what he wanted, and that, you know imagine being somewhere where there was no way that you could explain to somebody what you want you know what you want, but you can t explain it to somebody. J: It must be so frustrating, and then frustrating for the person who s trying to understand you as well. J: And I think just eliminating all that frustration that was a really a really positive thing erm He s he s pretty calm now. He doesn t really have tantrums and J: erm and I think I attribute at least some of that to the fact that he s been able to communicate what he wanted J: and sometimes how he felt as well. They erm they have signs for sad, and happy, and all of that as well J: so and, plus, it s just a nice thing to do, you know to go to a class. L: Yeah, fun, yeah. J: It s nice to do a class erm and yeah, you get a dictionary, and he s got DVDs which we still watch now, even though he doesn t have a he doesn t do any signs now. He s still quite expressive, actually, I ve noticed, with his body language, when he s talking, which is, maybe er something to do with it, but erm he still enjoys watching the programmes and I think he still gets things out of them, so J: Yeah, I think that was a brilliant thing to do. I actually found it first on YouTube. I think somebody had just sent me a link, or you know, I d seen it in a somewhere on a page a Google page, or something. Erm and there s a video online of a kid signing what he what she wants to eat, and she s quite small, I think, as well, so I just thought, Wow! Amazing! L: Aah. J: So, yeah we got on to that. I think it was a really good thing. Task 6 Follow-up This obviously works best with a multilingual class. Where possible, mix students from different countries in the demonstration phase. Image Credits Lenore Edman Page 6 of 6