This paper presents an overview of the British Sign Language Corpus Project - the first endeavor ever to create a machine-readable digital corpus of British Sign Language (BSL) collected from deaf signers across the United Kingdom. In the field of sign language studies, it represents a unique combination of methodology from variationist sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Unlike previous large-scale sign language sociolinguistic projects, the dataset is being annotated and tagged using ELAN software, given metadata descriptions, and the video data has been made accessible, with long-term efforts to make the dataset searchable on-line.

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This paper brings lexical variation among sign language users in Japan into focus. A nationwide data collection project, completed in 2010 with the help of 94 Deaf sign language users from all 47 prefectures of Japan, found that most items among the 30 lexical items showing extensive variation appear in data from the 70 year-old group, and there is little variation in data from the 30 year-old group. The further analysis on the data demonstrates explicitly that the lexical sharing phenomenon is occurring on sign language users in Japan.

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With the goal of advancing research on sign language corpora, the present paper proposes an integrated learner corpus of Japanese Sign Language that not only offers solutions to conceptual problems that have until now remained unsolved, but also contributes to Japanese Sign Language linguistics and education. The corpus has four main characteristics. First, the corpus covers linguistic abilities in the linguistic domains of generating and understanding. Second, the corpus enables examination of linguistic abilities with regard not only to the linguistic output generated by language learners, but also how linguistic output is generated. Examination of linguistic abilities with regard to these aspects reveals both the precision and process efficiency of linguistic output. Third, the corpus enables examination of basic linguistic abilities such as the manipulation of phonological-phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and semantic-discourse properties, because the designed language use situation prevented the use of advanced linguistic abilities including stylistic and rhetorical techniques, as well as non-linguistic abilities in specific academic or business domains. Finally, the corpus allows the development of linguistic abilities to be examined, as it can be regarded as quasi-longitudinal data. The corpus also provides data on the proficiency of language learners measured by a norm-referenced test that yields a scaled score. The proposed learner corpus is expected to serve as a useful language resource for research on Japanese Sign Language.

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The purpose of this article is to report the application of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) education in higher education in the United States, first by taking a general view of American Sign Language (ASL) education and Japanese education as one of language educations in the United States and then by presenting the current status of JSL education that is taking place at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Next, the meaning of JSL education in higher education in the United States will be presented through a comparison between JSL education at CSUN and the University of Rochester.

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It is difficult to recruit deaf or hard-of-hearing people into specialized positions in the construction of the support system to the deaf or hard-of-hearing students. The reason is because the adoption of a person engaging in access service such as note-taking and sign language interpretation is given top priority, and because it is all the more hard for outsiders to understand the advantage of having a deaf or hard-of-hearing person for the specialized position. This study analyzes the process with the case of G University that employs a deaf person for its Accessibility support center and the next year put her at the post of manager. The regulations of G University specify the adoption of part-time specialized support staff to provide sign language interpretation, but it was still difficult to employ a person who actually has a deaf or hard-of-hearing. When they needed various kinds of ways to support deaf or hard-of-hearing students and the staff started to engage in some specialization, all the staff was not required to work as sign language interpreter under this flexible guidance implementation. Also, when the accessibility support center was set up with system throughout the whole university, the position of manager was created and hired a deaf person as a part-time staff member to train the other support staff. The next year, she was promoted to manager. During staff specialization training, the deaf staff member was able to show the advantage of hiring impaired people as trainers. They didn’t even discuss whether the position of manager was possible for a deaf person.

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