By a happy coincidence, just as research on sign languages was getting underway at the University of Namur, a bilingual (French-LSFB) mainstream education program was launched at the Sainte-Marie School Community in Namur. And since 2000, collaborations between the university and Ecole et Surdité have continued to grow. The first result of this collaboration is the continuing education program established in 2004. This is a research group that facilitates regular meetings between bilingual teachers, university linguists, and LSFB experts. Magaly Ghesquière and Laurence Meurant have been collaborating since 2012 to describe the linguistic and pedagogical characteristics of Sainte-Marie’s inclusive bilingual education program. A book published by PUN and a symposium titled “Bilingual Education and Deafness” have brought this collaboration to fruition.

Linguistic research on LSFB began at the University of Namur in 2000 with the early work of Laurence Meurant. After studying the role of gaze, she conducted the first studies on discourse within the LSFB Corpus. In 2007, the path paved by Laurence enabled Aurélie Sinte to begin research focused on tense and aspect in LSFB. A few years later, Aurore Paligot (2011), Sílvia Gabarro-Lopez (2012), and Ingrid Notarrigo (2012) also joined the team. Their doctoral research focuses, respectively, on language registers, discourse markers and cues, and markers of fluency and disfluency. Their doctoral dissertations were defended in August 2017 (Ingrid), September 2017 (Sílvia), and March 2018 (Aurore). Since then, Alysson Lepeut has studied interactive gestures among older adults who are LSFB signers and speakers of Belgian French, and she defended her dissertation in October 2020. Two other dissertations are currently underway at the LSFB-Lab, both focused on comparing LSFB data with data from multimodal spoken French: Sébastien Vandenitte began his research in 2019 on constructed actions (or personal transfers), and Clara Lombart launched a study in 2020 on the prosodic marking of contrastive focus. At the same time, and in support of this research, Sibylle Fonzé, together with Bruno Sonnemans, is continuing the essential work of annotating the LSFB Corpus. Alice Heylens, for her part, is translating the videos from the LSFB corpus into French. Thanks to the annotation and translation of the corpus, we are compiling the first bilingual contextual dictionary between LSFB and French. In addition, since 2010, Bruno has been working on creating an online LSFB dictionary. In 2014, he produced a DVD containing signed (and subtitled) explanations of LSFB grammar.

Upon completion of the project (late 2015), the video corpus will be available online (subject to certain conditions) to the Deaf community, researchers, educators, interpreters, and the general public. The website is accessible free of charge. Feel free to explore it, use it, and share the link! The corpus’s Facebook page keeps you updated on events and news.