METALINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION TERMINOLOGY : A DEAF SIGNER PERSPECTIVE

We present here the case of one deaf student who attended two Language Teaching courses, the first one compulsory and the second one elective, necessary to satisfy the requirements to complete his Master of Arts-Linguistics program. We investigated a very specific aspect of metalinguistic knowledge by asking our participant to sign and describe a list of the most widely used technical terms of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). These were : Acquisition and Learning, Communicative competence, Interlanguage and Fossilization, Interference errors, Content and Functional words, Morpheme and Phoneme. All these terms had been introduced during lectures and laboratory sessions. Although our participant attended them with the assistance of an interpreter we found that he did not possess an explicit knowledge of the above concepts. Some terms were quite effectively signed due to an implicit awareness of their meaning, others were clearly resulting from literal translation from Italian, but were not fully understood. In a few cases our participant gave the same sign for two terms or was not able to produce any sign. The results suggest that enriching sign languages with metalinguistic terminology will help deaf students to really understand what they study and achieve better results in their academic endeavours.