On the contrary to popular opinion, sign language is not universal, and in fact each community has naturally and spontaneously created and developed its own sign language over the years. There is a system of international signs which enables deaf people to communicate at international meetings and conferences, but this is not in any way a natural language and is rather a convention of signs in order to summarise. For these reasons, fluid international communication between deaf people requires the learning of foreign sign languages, in exactly the same way as oral languages. However, in spite of the several initiatives put in place by the European Commission in order to promote multilingualism in Europe, little or nothing has been produced in terms of projects to create teaching and learning materials which might make this idea of multilingualism accessible to the deaf communities across Europe and, indeed, across the world. As a result, opportunities to learn foreign sign languages are severely limited when they exist at all, which therefore represents a significant obstacle to transnational communication between deaf people and, in turn, a clear limitation to their rights of citizenship, most obviously as far as the free circulation of citizens in Europe is concerned. With this in mind, the GMAS2 project, based on the original Give Me A Sign project which produced research into the language learning needs of the deaf (see www.givemeasign.site), aims to produce a digital learning platform containing real learning materials to enable deaf people to learn 5 foreign sign languages, at A1 and A2 levels (Portuguese, Turkish, Swedish, Austrian and British), created in accordance with the indicators described in ProSign (Sign Languages and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). These materials include detailed, lesson-by-lesson curricula, a cluster of strategically important face-to-face learning materials and online learning materials, a vocabulary resource and a teachers' guide based on the experiences obtained by testing everything we produce with groups of deaf learners in each country, learning one or more foreign sign languages via internet/video-powered distance learning courses. In this sense, by the end of the project something entirely new will have been established for the first time in history: it will have become possible to learn a foreign sign language directly through signs, without resorting to the additional burden of learning the written language, which is so often different from the sign language of the country (Austria, for example), and the deaf community in these countries will have become aware of the enormous advantages of this kind of learning. These include the chance to learn a new skill (a foreign sign language) and thus gain a new qualification to enhance their CV, plus the resulting opportunity to take part in VET mobility, which has been impracticable up to now because of the communication problem, the potential increase in employability and in attractiveness to employers given their new profile, in addition to socially important factors such as the chance to visit another country, often considered too difficult because of the communication barrier, the chance to make new friends in other deaf communities across Europe and to share ideas with them and, in short, the chance to reduce the risk of isolation which exists because these issues have never before been seriously addressed. It will also lead to a new profession: the foreign sign language teacher. We hope that this project will represent the turning point for deaf communities in Europe, that the GMAS2 digital learning platform will become the benchmark for foreign sign language learning in Europe and the start of a new era for the deaf, in which they finally begin to gain access to equal opportunities in learning and qualification.
Our aim was therefore to create learning curricula in several sign languages (as foreign languages) which could be used to enable deaf people to teach and learn foreign sign languages at A1 and A2 levels. These learning units would reflect the targets indicated by Prosign (the sign language equivalent of the QEFCRL) and also the needs and objectives of the deaf communities as expressed during the research carried out in phase 1 of the project. We then intended to complement these curricula with a sample of practical lessons at both A1 and A2 levels, a vocabulary glossary in the language sof the project and a guide for teachers as to how best to approach foreign sign language teaching, based on the experiences collected during this project and in other contexts. The idea was therefore not to prescribe, but to propose a learning path with specific goals to be achieved and suggestions as to how to achieve them in practice. This would then bridge the gap between phase 1 (research) and a proposed phase 3, in which the project website becomes an interactive learning tool.
This project resulted from a previous project, "Give Me A Sign", which carried out research into the learning of foreign sign languages by deaf people directly through signs, i.e. without using writing as an intermediary. Although it may sound surpising, as far as we know this was the first time this need had ever been addressed. If they have knowledge of international signs (which, by the way, is not a language), deaf people are able to understand a summary of what is being discussed, but no more than that. And of course the result of this is that during the decades throughout which European education and training programmes have existed, access by deaf communities to these programmes has been severely limited. If a deaf person, for example, would like to take part in a VET mobility experience, that would, until Give Me A Sign started, have implied either learning a foreign sign language (for which no materials existed) and understanding the written form of that foreign language, or hiring an interpreter to translate her/his national sign language into international signs, so that a second interpreter, from the host country, could convert this into the national sign language of the host country. A complex, expensive and impractical prodcedure, clearly, and one which has prevented many deaf people from taking part in such experiences or even travelling abroad.