Sign on! English for deaf sign language users on the Internet

This chapter presents a multimodal teaching tool developed in the course of the Socrates (Lingua Action 2) project SignOn! The objective of SignOn! is to enable deaf users to use written English for international contacts via the Internet. The project included a good deal of research, notably in the areas of deaf education, bilingualism and English as a foreign language so that fresh solutions could be found. As the level of English competence differed across the seven partner countries, cross-cultural issues were involved in the course design as well. The cognitive approach of SignOn! is learning while working on a text.