The Department of Culture, Arts & Leisure (DCAL) has kindly funded a BSL Linguistics and Sociolinguistics course which will run for a total of 6 weekends.

After a long period of planning and organising, the first weekend finally started in March. Avril Hepner and Frances Elton, British Sign Language Linguistics Trainers from the BSL Academy, delivered the BSL Linguistics course at Queen's University in Belfast.

BDA (Northern Ireland) identified a need to provide training for teachers in Northern Ireland who wish to acquire knowledge of their own language in order to ensure that they deliver high quality courses and have the academic knowledge to answer queries from non-deaf learners.

The training over the two full days was very intensive and was attended by 14 BSL Deaf teachers from all over Northern Ireland.

The training involved lots of activities to enhance learning, covering BSL linguistics and a range of contents such as what & what is not BSL, phonology, sign writing, morphology and so on.

Participants were very enthusiastic and enjoyed working together to support each other. One of the comments from the weekend was that they have been waiting for this kind of training for many years.

Sue Barry, training organiser said: "The BDA is so delighted and extremely grateful to DCAL for their funding to provide an excellent opportunity for local Deaf teachers to have a high quality of training, especially on their own home territory."

Avril Hepner said of the training: "It is wonderful to see the BDA, DCAL and Queen's University having a good working relationship to offer support to BSL teachers in Northern Ireland, in order to see teaching of a better quality and standard being provided."

Anyone interested in BSL courses should contact Avril, email: avrilh@bda.org.uk