Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre: ESRC Legacy Centre

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There are three primary objectives of the activities proposed in the DCAL Legacy Centre application: Impact Generation; Communication; Capacity Building. (1) Impact Generation. We aim to maximise the impact of the existing DCAL online resources listed below, all of which have been established with previous ESRC funding, by promoting and marketing these resources to the appropriate end-users. The funding will also be used, where necessary, to cover online hosting and service fees associated with each resource. a. DCAL Online Assessment Portal (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/dcal/dcal-portal). Over the last 12 years, DCAL researchers have created and standardised 9 assessments that are designed specifically for use with deaf adults or children, filling a much needed gap in the assessment tools available to practitioners (e.g. teachers, teachers of the deaf, educational psychologists, clinical psychologists and speech and language therapists) and researchers in the field. These tests are now hosted on an online portal. We aim to promote these assessments to practitioners and researchers working with deaf children or adults, who are the end-user groups who benefit from this resource.b. BSL Corpus (https://bslcorpusproject.org/). The BSL Corpus is one of a small handful of online corpora of sign languages worldwide. This online open resource hosts ~125 hours of BSL video data and associated transcriptions from a cross section of the BSL community from 8 different locations across the UK. The BSL Corpus allows documentation of how BSL is actually used, rather than how people have traditionally assumed it is widely used. BSL SignBank is an online BSL dictionary (http://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk/dictionary/) which includes signs from the BSL Corpus. The aim is to increase the awareness of these online resources within end user communities: BSL teachers; those running BSL interpreter courses; BSL independent learners; and researchers conducting research in the field of BSL or developing assessments.c. DCAL Research Data Archive (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/digital-collections/collections/dcal) is an online repository of DCAL's research data and associated supporting materials (documentation of procedures, stimuli, etc). We aim to increase awareness of these data and methods that are available for other researchers to use, thus increasing the impact of our research worldwide. (2) Communication: We aim to build-on and extend our excellent history of communication of our research with different groups. We will organise innovative public events that will include a celebration of the 40th anniversary since the first BSL research symposium (Nov 2019) and 2 x DCAL-x events (modelled on TED-x). We will also invest in more online routes to communication - e.g. short lay-summaries of our research publications and other key findings, accessible in English and BSL. (3) Capacity Building: We will continue our mission of capacity building of world-class researchers in the area of deafness, cognition and language - i.e. training new researchers in this field. We aim to consolidate and develop this further, via bursaries and team development. (a) We aim to establish travel bursaries so that deaf researchers can attend training courses that we offer. The aim will be to attract deaf individuals who can go on to study for a degree at UCL in our field. (b) We will also build capacity of our current team members by arranging a series of team development activities in order to ensure that DCAL develops through a time of change and continues to thrive.