Deaf lecturers’ translanguaging in a higher education setting. A multimodal multilingual perspective

Abstract

In a few universities around the world courses are offered where the primary language of instruction is a national sign language. Many of these courses are given by bilingual/multilingual deaf lecturers, skilled in both national sign language(s) and spoken/written language(s). Research on such deaf-led practices in higher education are lacking, and this study will contribute to a greater understanding of these practices. Drawing on ethnographically created data from a higher education setting in Sweden, this case study examines the use of different languages and modalities by three deaf lecturers when teaching deaf and hearing (signing) students in theoretic subjects. The analysis is based on video-recordings of the deaf lecturers during classroom activities at a basic university level in which Swedish Sign Language (SSL) is used as the primary language. The results illustrate how these deaf lecturers creatively use diverse semiotic resources in several modes when teaching deaf and hearing (signing) students, which creates practices of translanguaging. This is illustrated by classroom activities in which the deaf lecturers use different language and modal varieties, including sign languages SSL and ASL as well as Swedish, and English, along with PowerPoint and whiteboard notes. The characteristics of these multimodal-multilingual resources and the usage of them will be closely presented in this article.

Describe, don't prescribe. The practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers

“…These examples include combining and rapid switching between linguistic features and modalities such as signing, gesturing, speaking, mouthing, writing (in the air, on paper, on hands or arms), typing (on mobile phones, on calculators, on computers), fingerspelling in different (named) languages, pointing at text, placing a sign on a Power-Point slide, and so on (see e.g. Holmström and Schönström 2018;Kusters 2017b;Safar 2017). Sometimes these strategies are successful, sometimes not, but all of the above examples could probably, in principle, be called 'translanguaging'.…”

“When I speak people look at me”

“…However, explorations of multimodal, multilingual languaging practices draw attention to the wide range of linguistic and semiotic repertoires available to both deaf and hearing signers . Multimodal translanguaging has been explored as a strategy used to scaffold learning among young deaf students (Swanwick 2016(Swanwick , 2017; between adult deaf and hearing people in university lectures (Napier 2016a;Holmström and Schönström 2017); and between spoken and written forms of Hindi, Marathi, English, Gujarati, sign language, and gesture between deaf and hearing people in Mumbai (Kusters 2017). To our knowledge, there has never been any previous consideration of how and why deaf signers engage in translanguaging when working with sign language interpreters, and how that is perceived by other deaf people.…”

Natural and elicited: Sign language corpus linguistics and linguistic ethnography as complementary methodologies

“…LE researchers have used action-based and participatory methods that actively involve members of the community in the production of the data (e.g. Holmström & Schönström, 2018;Weber & Snoddon, 2020). Others work in research teams, documenting how they navigate their relationships and addressing the impact of their research role through reflexive engagement (e.g.…”