The didactics of French sign language : The rise or recognition of a fully-fledged discipline in its own right ? ; La didactique de la langue des signes française : Naissance ou reconnaissance d’une discipline à part entière ?

International audience ; (Translated by Karen Meschia) : This article offers some insights into the branch of studies that French sign language and its associated didactics should properly belong to. Our basic premise is that the role of any didactics is to observe teaching phenomena and then construct concepts which can describe them. We shall begin by showing how, despite resistance, the language has become an object of study in universities, both as a langage taught and a teaching language. The history of sign language and of deaf social and cultural specificities has long been a polemical one in France. Our aim here is not to dwell on the particularities of deaf culture (shared experience, belonging to a peer group, habitus, communication strategies, adapting to life in a hearing society etc.), but we will nevertheless keep in mind that language and culture are indissociable when discussing language teaching. French sign language this ‘language for the deaf’ was the victim of over a century of denial. It was seen for a long time as a very restricted code, no more than a form of mimicry, which could not be counted as a language. Most notable was the general refusal, from 1880 on, to use the visual resources of sign language in teaching deaf pupils. The issues around teaching the deaf were systematically reduced to the technical question of improving oral French. In this way, oral production and lip-reading were exclusively focused on to the detriment of any attention that might be given to course content, or to interactions between teachers and deaf pupil(s). The resulting underlying confusion has persisted, as Mottez puts it: ‘since deafness was a pathology, their language would also be one’(Mottez, 1979, in Benvenuto, 2006, p. 252). This is why the recognition of FSL as one of the languages of France in its own right in the early 21st century was such a remarkable advance. It was only in the 1960s and 70s that linguists such as Stokoe and Markowicz (Gallaudet College, Washington DC, USA) began the formal ...