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Fingers
to fly on Friday
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[May 02, 2007]
SPRINGFIELD -- On Friday, the Illinois Deaf and
Hard of Hearing Commission will host the 10th annual Deaf
FingerSpelling Bee. The event will be at Brookens Auditorium at the
University of Illinois at Springfield, 1 University Plaza.
Registration will be from 9 to 9:45, and the program will begin at
10 a.m., with completion before 1 p.m.
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This is the fifth year for the commission to host and sponsor this
event, as well as the fifth year for event to be in Springfield.
Sponsoring the event along with the commission are the Illinois
Telecommunications Access Corp., the Chicago Mayor's Office for
People with Disabilities, Illinois Association for the Deaf,
www.aslpro.com and Sprint.
Participants involved in this event are intermediate deaf students
from Illinois schools with deaf programs and will include two
different groups. Group A will consist of students in the
fifth-sixth-grade level at the time of competition. Group B will
consist of students in the seventh-eighth-grade level at the time of
competition.
The first-, second-, third-place and alternate finalists (fourth
place) from each school go on to regional competition. The first-
second-, third-place and alternate finalists (fourth place) from
each regional go to the statewide competition.
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 Each school designates its presenters to serve as the
representatives to sign the words for the competitors to spell out.
A panel of three judges will preside. In competition, after the
presenter signs and says a word, the contestant signs or says the
word again before spelling it. The contestant must then fingerspell
the word. Upon missing the spelling of a word, the contestant
immediately drops out of the contest. The winner is determined when
the last two spellers are competing and one misses, and the other,
after correcting the error and correctly spelling the next word on
the presenter's list, is declared the champion.
The reference material used for this event is from the American
Sign Language Dictionary by Martin Sternberg and
www.aslpro.com.
For more information, please contact Kent Schafer, contest
coordinator, at
Kent.Schafer@illinois.gov, or the Illinois Deaf and Hard of
Hearing Commission, 1630 S. Sixth St., Springfield, IL 62703;
877-455-3323, voice or TTY.
[Text from
Illinois Deaf and Hard of
Hearing Commission news release received from
the
Illinois Office of
Communication and Information]
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