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This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on texts and performances being set within and drawing on a range of disciplines and analytical techniques. However, attention has so far been paid to the texts and performances rather than to the process of their creation. While working with four of the UK's most prolific sign-language poets, exploring and trying to understand more about British Sign Language (BSL) poetry, we became increasingly interested in the creative processes that occur and emerge in the composition itself. We decided to give them a task related to creative anthropomorphism and asked them to think "out loud" about the process as they created their compositions. We took our lead from think-aloud protocols, which have been used extensively in studies of cognitive processes and knowledge acquisition to understand how we solve problems (van Someren, Barnard, and Sandberg 1994; Tirkkonen-Condit and Jaaskelainen 2000; Stone 2009). We invited the poets to reflect upon and share with each other how they tackle a particular challenging aspect that is often incorporated in sign-language poems. This shared thinking process enabled them to explore anthropomorphic concepts together and jointly to create poetic examples, while also giving us insight into the processes of task completion (rather than only its final product). (Contains 3 notes and 6 figures.)

Research presented here describes the sign names and the customs of name allocation within the British Deaf community. While some aspects of British Sign Language sign names and British Deaf naming customs differ from those in most Western societies, there are many similarities. There are also similarities with other societies outside the more familiar cultures of most English-speakers. Naming customs in the British Deaf community are shown here to vary over time, with changes in education and other key elements of the British Deaf experience influencing the choice and use of sign names. While descriptive sign names are important within the British Deaf community, arbitrary signs, and those derived from the English language are also important. Additionally BSL sign names are shown to vary among different sections of the Deaf community. In contrast to reports from America, we find that British Deaf parents in the past have rarely allocated sign names to their children-deaf or hearing-beyond finger-spelled forms of their English names. Some of these children of Deaf parents retain these fingerspelled forms throughout their lives. Others only acquire names motivated by descriptive processes on entering school or even later in life. Thus, we conclude that, unlike people in many societies, the overwhelming majority of British Deaf people appear to acquire descriptive sign names from outside their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deaf teachers around the world have folk models and beliefs that reflect their understanding of what deaf children need to learn in order to develop healthy identities as deaf people. In this research we report what teachers from England, the USA and Mexico have told us about using creative signing with deaf children. Themes emerging from our data suggest that some deaf folk beliefs vary across national boundaries but that assumptions about deaf ways to foster learning are remarkably similar in all three countries. This suggests that there is something quintessentially deaf about these assumptions that exist alongside formal training or national heritage. In interviews deaf teachers told us that deaf children learn by being engaged, by participating in the group and by using sign language for themselves - and that signed narratives facilitate all three of these learning strategies. A second emergent theme covers the teachers' beliefs about specific abilities and knowledge that deaf children need to learn, and that their teachers help them learn. In all three countries, teachers reported using signed stories to help the children learn to communicate and interact, to have fun with signing and to see what is possible for deaf people to achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a dine of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the range of possibilities for both manual and nonmanual articulators when the signer engages in (almost) complete embodiment of the nonhuman character, and how nonhumans are portrayed as communicating via sign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]