ProSign 2: Promoting Quality in Sign Language Teaching in Europe

The ProSign 2 project was carried out as part of the Languages at the Heart of Learning framework programme at the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) in Graz/Austria from 2016 to 2019. It is a follow-up project to ProSign 1: Signed Languages for Professional Purposes.

Building on the results of ProSign 1, the first step ProSign 2 was to conduct a Europe-wide survey with the aim of gaining an overview of the education and further education opportunities for sign language teachers.

The project pursued the following objectives:

• Development of a competence-orientated framework of reference for sign language teachers.
• Compilation of teaching and practice materials for level B2, based on various European sign languages.
• Development of a framework for a European Language Portfolio (ELP) that does justice to the modality-specific aspects of sign languages

The target groups of this project were:

• Lecturers who work in education and further education programmes in the tertiary sector for sign language teachers
• People who are training to become sign language teachers and
• Sign language learners

The following methodological approach has been chosen:

• Creation of a first draft of a competence-oriented framework of reference for sign language teachers. The following resources and sources form the basis:

1. Available information on education programmes for sign language teachers in Europe.
2. Framework of reference for language teachers of spoken languages with an interface for the ECML project Towards a CEFR for Language Teachers
3. Input from experts

• Feedback from a network meeting in 2017 and a workshop in 2018 was incorporated into a revision. The feedback was recorded in writing and then incorporated into additions and clarifications to the competence descriptions.

At end of the project, a publication website was created. All resources are available there in the form of English texts and in International Sign. The website contains the following products:

• Competence-oriented framework of reference for the education and further education of sign language teachers.
• Information about and resources for sign language assessment.
• Examples of an electronic European Language Portfolio (ELP) for sign language learners.
• Resources from the ProSign 1 project.

The project makes a contribution ...

• to improve sign language teaching, both on the part of teachers and learners.
• the increasing professionalisation and standardisation of training courses for sign language teachers.
• for greater awareness of the teaching and learning of sign languages in the context of the UNCRPD and its contribution to inclusion.
• for a greater awareness of the linguistic and cultural diversity of sign languages within Europe.
• for the promotion of the recognition of sign language learning as a component of foreign languages.