Words in Hand

From watching both of these pieces of tape Clive's joke and Clark's account of the boat trip that you're really beginning to tune in into BSL as if you're learning any other language we've got to get rid of our ideas about our language and clue into the new language that we're looking at.

In BSL it's a little bit more difficult for hearing people, because they're so familiar with spoken language and they've got to learn how to extract information from a sign language, gestural language. There's one thing that might have been giving you a few worries and a few problems, that's the fact that both of the signers used fingerspelling. We're going to be presenting some information about fingerspelling and the way that is used in sign language in the later tapes, but it might be an idea now to give you a few hints.

The first thing to say is that very often the signer gives information in fingerspelling in signing as well the same information, so he often gives the same information twice so don't worry if you've missed the fingerspelling, or can't read it at all, you'll probably find the information is given in some other way as well.

The second point is often that the signer or fingerspeller is fingerspelling names, and I know it can be a nuisance to miss those names and that information, but very often we can still continue to understand the general meaning of the signer. So just try to ignore the fingerspelling problem if you can't fully understand the fingerspelling.

Well I think you've had enough explanation for now, so I'm going to let you see a short extract from a children's story called 'Football Crazy' and it's signed by Gerry Hughes. I think you'll enjoy it and we'll look at this again in the next tape and talk about it a little bit more, so until then, bye for now.