At the behest of the Polish Ministry of National Education, the Section for Sign Linguistics is carrying out a project to develop a multimedia course in Polish Sign Language (PJM) for students in grades I-III. The course will consist of four parts, covering two levels of fluency (A1 and A2). The materials are being developed by an expert team consisting of Joanna Filipczak, Monika Grabowska-Dobrowolska and Małgorzata Lilmanówka. Work is now underway on recording texts in PJM, being signed by Monika Krawczyk, Artur Werbel and Joanna Łacheta. We are very pleased that we are able to create more and more materials for Deaf grade-school students! Have a look at a few images showing recent recording sessions.

We wish to congratulate Marek Śmietana for winning a grant from the “Universitatis Varsoviensis” Foundation for Students and Graduates of the University of Warsaw! The grant will fund Marek’s project entitled “Stereotypes about the Deaf among hearing Poles”. More information is available here.

On 21-22 September 2018, the UW Section for Sign Linguistics in collaboration with the European Language Council is organizing an international conference in Warsaw entitled “Language Rights: Issues and Good Practices”. The focus will be on language rights (pertaining to both phonic languages and sign languages) as reflected in healthcare, education, social services, contacts with the law-enforcement and justice system, migration and asylum-seeking. Paper proposals can be submitted until the end of May. The languages of the conference will be English and Polish Sign Language (PJM). More information available here.

From 28 February to 2 March, the UW Section for Sign Linguistics was honored to host Jakub Jehlička, Hana Prokšová and Lucie Stanovská from Charles University in Prague. They participated in working meetings with our team and presented their own research to UW students. Our colleagues from Prague are planning to launch work on creating a corpus for Czech Sign Language, modeled after the Polish Sign Language corpus. It is perhaps worth noting that the corpus put together by our team is currently one of the two largest such corpora in the world.

We are very pleased to announce that more products of our work at the UW Section for Sign Linguistics have appeared on the Polish Ministry of Education website: a set of exercise books for the general education curriculum (created by our team from scratch and adapted for the educational needs and psychophysical capabilities of pupils with disabilities, encountering difficulties in learning or communication) and a book in the “Język polski na plus” series about the Polish language. More details and links to the materials can be found here.

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