Confederacy of a Dunce - Impending assessment

Friday, May 26, 2006

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In two weeks' time, I'll receive my first formal assessment in British Sign Language... taking the test for CACDP (Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People) Level 1 certification. The test criteria (taken from the CACDP's website) are whether the person is able to:

identify and use simple, commonly used expressions, question forms and conventions associated with BSL/ISL*;
request and provide information appropriate to the context;
express themselves in the language clearly enough so that a sympathetic native user of the language would understand questions and contributions.

*ISL = Irish Sign Language; CACDP certification is available in either.

The test is conducted face-to-face with a fluent signer, and takes about 10 minutes, with three components: basic conversation (what's your name, what do you do for a living, etc.), question and answer, and storytelling (take a minute or so to tell a story based on a series of pictures). Everyone seems fairly confident that I will breeze through it, mainly because I get a lot more practice than the others in my class (I share an office with three fluent signers, and the informal rule is that I should try to use BSL first in office conversations, particularly those of a social nature). But that doesn't help when it comes to the examination jitters -- the assessment was arranged yesterday and I've already had my first "Level 1 assessment nightmare". I swear this blog isn't going to turn into a dream journal, but here goes anyway:

The format of the Level 1 exam was a little different than specified above: it was a panel interview in a large auditorium. The content was a bit different as well: I was asked to describe my Ph.D. thesis research in BSL and answer questions of a technical nature. I had of course not prepared for this type of examination, instead rehearsing things like "I grew up in America, now I live in north London. I work as a language researcher and I have a wife and a cat." Needless to say this was not suitable to deal with (signed) questions like "how can you justify making a distinction between conceptual, nonlinguistic representations and semantic representations that are strictly verbal in nature?". The only thing missing (or not missing as the case may be) was that I was fully clothed.

language

Friday, May 26, 2006 11:37:24 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)