Today, most of deaf children are studying in a mainstream school, which has created new challenges in organizing bilingual teaching (spoken + signed language together). The corpus can serve as a tool for accessing sign language teaching. A digital learning environment develops educational materials as well methods for deaf children.
In this paper we discuss the contribution of a corpus to sign language teaching in mainstream schools. Corpus refers here to an annotated collection of video material comprising stories and conversations from 103 signers of two sign languages: Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) and Finland-Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL). The first subset of the corpus, approximately 14,5 hours of video, was released in the spring 2019 for public use. Today, most of deaf children are studying in a mainstream school, which has created new challenges in organizing bilingual teaching (spoken + signed language). The corpus can serve as a tool for accessing sign language teaching. A digital learning environment develops educational materials as well methods for deaf children. We have launched a pilot project on building learning material for students of our new in-service training program. The students are teachers of FinSL or FinSSL. The aim is to make a learning package that helps everyone in using the published corpus independently. Follow-up period with the pilot will be completed during the academic year 2019-2020. The received results and experiences will be utilized in building a corresponding package for deaf children. It´s important take into account different language skills of the mainstreamed pupils. The educational materials must also be applied to those who don´t use sign language as their mother tongue (L2). The corpus provides an excellent opportunity to explore the signing material of native signers who are role models from a perspective of the vitality of signed languages. References Salonen, J., Takkinen, R., Puupponen, A., Nieminen, H. & Pippuri, O. (2016). Creating Corpora of Finland´s Sign Languages. Proceedings - The 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining, 179-184.
