Fifteen Years Representing ‘Directly Useful Linguistics’

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Fifteen Years Representing ‘Directly Useful Linguistics’

Ildikó Bodnár

Institute of Modern Philology ildikobodnar@gmail.com

Keywords: applied linguistics, sign language as mother tongue, bilingual education, Act No. CXXV of 2009 on sign language, national conferences and discus- sions

Introduction

I became lecturer at the University of Miskolc in September 1998, after almost 25 years’ of teaching in secondary schools and with two semesters’ teaching experience partly at Veszprém and partly at Gödöllő University. As since my secondary school years, I have mostly been interested in linguistics, this meant that one of my big dreams came true with this career change. For 15 years, I had the opportunity to teach at the Department of Applied Linguistics, – later:

Department of Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies – of the University of Miskolc. That was where I retired from in December 2013.

About my career, I should like to say in a nutshell that I graduated from Eötvös Loránd University of Arts and Sciences as a teacher of Hungarian language and literature and Russian language and literature in 1975. Then, in 1979, I earned my degree in French language and literature at the same university. In addition to the three majors above, I completed my studies as a major of the German language at Budapest University of Economics between 1992 and 1995. In 1991, I earned my PhD degree in phonetics. Most of my early publications were either concerned with this field or with stylistics as the topic of my thesis for the ‘doctor of university’ degree, which I defended in 1982, was the stylistic approach to modern poetry, more closely, to Sándor Weöres’ poetic works. I wrote my first textbook in 1989. From the period when I worked as a secondary school teacher, the most significant time was the four school-years when I taught in the French bilingual academic grammar school in Pásztó, ac- quiring considerable experience concerning new methods and trends in language teaching.

In compliance with the editors’ request, instead of giving an overview of my whole career as a university lecturer, I am only going to focus on the subjects and classes that I felt to be most memorable ones, those providing a good opportunity for research work and making it possible to produce several

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scholarly publications. At the same time, this was the linguistics research field where I could experience the ‘directly useful linguistics’ character of applied linguistics, as the discipline was named by Professor György Szépe, one of the founders or ‘fathers’ of Hungarian applied linguistics.

1. The beginnings of involvement with sign language at our university

My involvement with a sign language programme was due to my colleague, and later department head, Sarolta dr Simigné dr Fenyő, who considered it important to launch this programme for students of applied linguistics. As she wrote in one of her articles: ‘The Department of Applied Linguistics of the Uni- versity of Miskolc launched the programme to educate students majoring applied linguistics in 2002. Within this framework, the course entitled Sign language and sign language practice, forming part of the training structure, ap- peared in the students’ timetable first in country. …When the Bologna system was introduced, the department had the opportunity to elaborate a specialisation named Sign language expert attached to the BA programme in Hungarian language and literature.’¹

Sign language itself was taught by deaf persons, well-prepared for teaching it by SINOSZ (Hungarian Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing) but as related subjects (Education and culture of deaf persons, Foundations of language policy, Neurological aspects of deafness, Language rights of deaf persons, Basics of interpreting in sign language, etc.) had to be taught, as well, hearing teachers also joined the teaching staff. In the beginning, as a lecturer teaching other applied linguistics subjects at our department, I only observed our students’ using sign language as an outsider, and this was how I experienced what communication difficulties the deaf instructors had when they had to make ar- rangements in the office.

2. Getting involved in the training of students studying sign language

I got involved in the sign language programme in academic year 2007/2008. As the first step, making a big decision, I enrolled in a beginner course in sign language advertised by SINOSZ. During the following years, I passed the A1 (in 2008), the A2/1 (in 2009), the A2/2 (in 2010) and B1 (in 2010) level profi- ciency examinations in sign language, and then completed the intermediate level sign language course of Unheard Foundation, too. I had to make a big effort to get these certificates as it is not at all an easy task to acquire sign language.

1 SIMIGNÉ FENYŐ Sarolta, „Jelnyelvi képzés a Miskolci Egyetemen az interkulturalitás jegyében”, in Az inter-kulturalitás aspektusai, szerk. SIMIGNÉ FENYŐ Sarolta és CSETNEKI Sándorné BODNÁR Ildikó és KEGYESNÉ SZEKERES Erika, (Miskolc: Miskolci Egyetemi Kiadó, 2010) 154–160.

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Of course, in the possession of this knowledge, I did not teach sign language as it continued to be the responsibility of the instructors provided by SI- NOSZ but the subjects related to sign language mentioned above, and due to the extension of our academic programmes, a number of new subjects, too, which were, however, all related to the topic area of the deaf community and sign language communication. I took a greater and greater interest in sign linguistics, which emerged from the 1960s mostly in the USA but in Hungary only from the end of the 1990s. For the students of the Sign language expert specialisation, I had the opportunity to teach the course The grammar of sign language, give lec- tures and seminars in Applied phonetics and talk about Bilingual education and The psychological aspects of deafness.

3. Sign language programmes for the hearing and linguistics courses for deaf graduates

And now, we are immediately in 2009, in the year when the Act on sign language (officially Act No. CXXV of 2009) was passed. Its creation was a turning-point in the life of the deaf community.

At that time, sign language had already been taught at our department for seven academic years. One of the important ideas in the Act on sign language is to start the sign language, or better to say, bilingual (= involving two languages:

sign language and Hungarian) education of deaf children as soon as possible, which was planned to replace the former one-sided, oral education from Sep- tember 2017. (Unfortunately, the introduction of bilingual education in the schools of the deaf has not started up to the present day because of the delay in preparatory research, among others, sign linguistics research.)

At our department, two further programmes, Sign language mentor specialised further training and Linguistics and didactics of sign language specialised further training were launched following the first programmes elaborated for students of applied linguistics and Hungarian literature and linguistics, and the first version of the MA programme was elaborated, which, however, was not introduced at our department. The curriculum of a course entitled Sign language communication and improving accessibilty – How to communicate with deaf people? was also elaborated as a course that all the students of the university could enrol in and that had a large number of students in the semester concerned (from February 2014). Unfortunately, this initiative was discontinued, too.

From the beginning, traineeship spent with the deaf community was part of the training programme, which brought the worlds of the hearing and the deaf even closer to each other. The contact was further strengthened in the sign language camps, where several of our students applied each year. The students

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also often reported cases when they helped deaf youngsters in the most varied scenes of life with the help of their sign language knowledge. About this topic, a longer article was published in HASÉ (=Hard of hearing), the monthly periodical of the deaf and hard of hearing. As the participant of four sign language camps, I myself also kept improving my sign language knowledge, which I oc- casionally use even now.

In each course, the clarification of the huge number of misunderstandings concerning sign language and the deaf occupied a significant part. Our students gave reports on their research and awareness-raising work in the field in sem- inar papers and dissertations.

Sign language mentor programme: Those completing this specialised further training programme are able to apply the knowledge acquired in the specialised training, that is, they are able to keep contact and implement efficient communication between a person belonging to the deaf community and society (social institutions); give deaf people efficient assistance in solving different problems in their lives and get themselves accepted in deaf communities. They are able to offer their help and adapt to the etiquette of sign communication and social communication as well as to the rules of etiquette, and in the possession of proper psychological groundings are able to relate to the communication situation and its participants with self-knowledge, tolerance and empathy.

Some of the above requirements, cited from the line for Output requirements, were already fulfilled when students entered the programme. For exam- ple, we had a student who started to learn sign language for the sake of a deaf student attending her class while another student was motivated to complete the programme by a deaf person (sister) living in the family, or rather by the enormous difference she experienced about the life of the deaf in England after his sister had moved abroad. We had the current secretary of SINOSZ for Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county among our students, and he also worked as an instructor in the programme as he had a degree in law. There were even some students registering for the programme who had earlier graduated as majors of applied linguistics and therefore already had some knowledge about sign language.

Linguistics and didactics of sign language programme: Students who were hard of hearing and knew sign language as their mother tongue studied methodological subjects related to linguistics and the teaching of sign language. ‘In the possession of the linguistic and didactic-methodological groundings acquired in this specialised further training programme, they became experts who were not only capable of teaching sign language but would be able to give assistance with the sign language BA/MA programme under elaboration. This was of great importance and was a stopgap because earlier, deaf people with

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academic degrees could not get involved in training the teachers later educating deaf and hearing-impaired people or in the education of deaf children’– wrote Sarolta Simigné Fenyő.²

Here, there were students with degrees in teaching, engineering or law, who undertook further studies after the many difficulties of earning their first degrees in the hope that they would be able to help the members of the younger generation. In fact, the dissertation of one of these students was also published in book form and may be cited as a source in the future. Árpád Zoltán Kárpáti’s book has the title Gondolatébresztő! (‘Thought-provoking’) with the subtitle:

Egy apa jegyzetei a siket gyermekek oktatásáról (‘A father’s notes about the education of deaf children’).

Returning to our Sign language mentor specialised further training programme, it was launched in September 2009. The other programme was our specialised further training programme entitled Linguistics and didactics of sign language, which was implemented between 2010 and 2012. In two consecutive academic years, the former had 8-8 hearing graduate students while the latter had altogether 10 deaf graduate students in one year. The latter students were selected in an entrance exam held together with SINOSZ in Budapest. It can only be hoped that these people do a lot right now and will do a lot in the near future, too, for the welfare of deaf youngsters. Both of these programmes advocated bilingual education.

4. The whole country watches Miskolc – sign language programmes, research projects and conferences at our university

Simultaneously with launching our Sign language mentor programme, we or- ganised our first sign language conference at Miskolc University with the active participation and support of SINOSZ, which was followed by three further such conferences, held at the Faculty of Arts. In these conferences, both hearing and deaf people gave presentations with continuous interpreting to sign language and interpreting sign language to Hungarian. The conferences had the following titles:

1) In 2009: Sign language in everyday life and in scientific research – with 10 presentations;

2) In 2010: Visible and audible communication – characteristics of sign language and sounding language communication – with 14 presentations;

2 SIMIGNÉ FENYŐ Sarolta, „Véget érne a jelnyelvi képzés a Miskolci Egyetemen?”, Alkalmazott Nyel- vészeti Közlemények, 9(2014) 1. sz. 51–59.

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3) In 2011: Different aspects of linguistic mediation – sign language and sounding language communication, translation and interpreting – with 8 presentations;

4) In 2012: Perspectives of sign language and sounding language communication – with 11 presentations.

Conference presenters came from all over the country: from Budapest, Győr, Eger and Pécs, and even from abroad, from Slovakia. Three of our conferences were attended by Ádám Kósa, then national president of SINOSZ and a Euro- pean Parliament representative. Gergely Tapolczai, member of Parliament both gave a presentation and recited several poems in sign language. He was one of those ten deaf students with a degree who attended our Linguistics and didactics of sign language programme. Another deaf student, painter and teacher of drawing in a school for the deaf, Tamás Vincze also recited poems. SINOSZ members in Miskolc were present among the audience in an almost full number. Miskolc Television broadcast reports about the event several times, inter- viewing organisers, contributors and interpreters.

The presentations set out several times that sign language is the main car- rier of deaf identity. At the same time, due to the medical approach, sign language could not play a role in the education of deaf children for a long time. It was a slow process worldwide, too, that the anthropological approach to deafness, the recognition of sign language as a language and bilingual education re- lying also on sign language gained ground. An important regular accompanying event of the conferences was a theatre performance, which was mediated to the deaf audience by a sign language interpreter, thanks to Miskolc National Thea- tre. Of all this, a longer report can be read in the periodical Modern Nyelvok- tatás.³

5. Research projects, presentations and articles related to sign language

While teaching different topics related to sign language, I had several important insights, some of which were published in articles and scholarly papers. It was not a coincidence that the history of the education of the deaf was connected to the history of phonetics research from the very beginning both as regards Hun- garian linguistics and on the international level. Antal Simon was an outstand- ing figure in both the history of Hungarian special education (educating the deaf) and Hungarian phonetics. The internationally also significant Farkas Kempelen, the creator of the speaking machine, in his book entitled Az emberi beszéd mechanizmusa (’The mechanism of human speech’), published in 1791

3 BODNÁR Ildikó,„Gondolatok a jelnyelvről: Beszámoló egy konferenciasorozatról” Modern Nyelvok- tatás 19(2013) 1–2. sz. 133–141.

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(in the German language, so the book became widely known) devoted pages to his visit in the Paris institute for the deaf and the praise of sign language. E. W.

Brücke was a significant representative of 19th century phonetics; the address- ees of his synthesizing work published in 1876 (Grundzüge der physiologie und systematik der sprachlaute für linguisten und taubstummenlehrer) in the presentation of the physiology and system of speech sounds are linguists and teachers of the deaf and dumb. But today’s phoneticians also investigate the problems of deafness in many publications. In the Research Institute for Linguistics, several hearing and deaf researchers investigate sign language now.

It can be summarised in several points why sign language is a language. To sum them up: the main characteristics of human language: that is, discreteness, compositionality and conventionality are also characteristic of sign language. It can be examined what is the phoneme in sign language. It is the smallest signed unit that has a meaning distinguishing function. Thus a phoneme may be e.g.

the shape of the hand, the place, direction and speed of signing, or the accompanying facial expression. All these problems represented important parts in my own sign language research just like the trinity of icon-index-symbol, the order of signs or the problems of pro-forms. In a longer presentation, I com- pared sign language and isolating languages like Chinese, which I study right now, too, as an old-age pensioner (Az ikon, az index és a szimbólum a kínai írás- jegyek és a siketek jelei körében (‘Icon, index and symbol among Chinese char- acters and the signs of the deaf’)).

From among my publications published between 2009 and 2013, ten or twelve are more closely related to the topic area of sign language communication, the education and culture of the deaf, and the linguistic approach to sign language. Between 2009 and 2014, I also gave about ten presentations but they were not published in printed form in every case. One of these presentations was the one entitled Versek jelnyelven, jelnyelv a költészetben (‘Poems in sign language, sign language in poetry’), which I delivered after two of our deaf students attending the specialised further training Linguistics and didactics of sign language recited poems in sign language, as has already been mentioned. In September 2011, I gave a presentation in the German language entitled Un- terricht der Gebärdensprache at Košice Technical University,⁴ while at Zrínyi Mi- klós National Defense University, I gave a presentation about the terminology of sign language education and research in the French language Langue de spécialité sur le domain de la langue des signes. These latter two presentations

4 Ildikó BODNÁR, „Unterricht der Gebärdensprache„, in FORLANG: Fremdsprachen im akademischen Bereich, ed. Anton CIZMAR, (Košice: Technical University of Kosice, 2011) 22–30.

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were given at international conferences and their texts were published in printed form in full.

Conclusion

This is not a really happy ending. And it is because today, there is no sign language education programme whatsoever offered at the University of Miskolc. It was officially proclaimed at the World Congress of the Deaf in Tokyo in 1991 that sign language is the mother tongue of deaf people. It is a pity that this sen- tence was not incorporated in the Hungarian Act on sign language, and as a re- sult, we could not employ a deaf person as a native language assistant, who could have become a key contributor in all our further programmes. But if it was not feasible this way, probably, efforts could and should have been made for the good cause in another way, as well. Thus, sign language education at any level proved to be only an episode in the life of Miskolc University although it might as well have become a consciously undertaken and really noble activity opening up future perspectives of a really 21st century educational institution.

‘…Between 2002 and 2012, the conditions for the scholarly investigation of sign language and sign language culture were created at Miskolc University and it would be a pity to let them vanish… The teaching of sign language and the dis- semination of knowledge related to sign language culture could be an important tool to transform society and bridge the gap between the deaf and the hearing’

– wrote Sarolta Simigné Fenyő in 2014^.5 By now, it seems that after all, every- thing has been lost.

Translated by Judit Szabóné Papp

5 SIMIGNÉ FENYŐ, Véget érne… op.cit.

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My major publications on the topic:

BODNÁR Ildikó, “Kísérletek a jelnyelv lejegyzésére„, in microCAD 2009, M szekció: XXIII. microCad International Scientific Conference Miskolc, szerk. LEHOCZKY László, (Miskolc: Miskolci Egyetem In- novációs és Technológia Transzfer Centrum, 2009) 155–160.

Ildikó BODNÁR, “Langue de spécialité sur le domaine de la langue des signes„, in Szaknyelvi kommu- nikáció nemzetközi szemszögből: Szaknyelvi kommunikáció 2009, szerk. FREGAN Beatrix, (Budapest:

Zrínyi Miklós Nemzetvédelmi Egyetem, 2009) 75–79.

BODNÁR Ildikó, “Encounter of the hearing persons and the deaf – A halló és a siket kultúra talá- lkozásáról“, in: microCAD 2010, R szekció: XXIV. microCad International Scientific Conference Miskolc, szerk. BIKFALVY Péter, Bölcsészettudomány. (Miskolc: Miskolci Egyetem, 2010) 1–9.

BODNÁR Ildikó, “A magyar mint idegen nyelvi tankönyvek felhasználásának egy lehetséges új területe – Hallássérültek magyar nyelvi oktatása”, Hungarológiai Évkönyv 13(2012) 123–141.

BODNÁR Ildikó, “Kommunikáció a siket közösség és a halló társadalom között”, in Az interkulturális kommunikáció elmélete és gyakorlata, szerk. GECSŐ Tamás – SÁRDI Csilla, (Székesfehérvár és Buda- pest: Kodolányi János Főiskola és Tinta Könyvkiadó, 2013) 32–37.