Multi-modal visually-oriented translanguaging among Deaf signers

Abstract

Translanguaging is often regarded with great skepticism in the context of Deaf education, as an approach that has already been tried, with disastrous results. Already in the 1960’s educators understood the critical importance of allowing deaf children to exploit their full linguistic repertoire for learning: not only listening, lip-reading and reading/writing, but also sign language, fingerspelling, gesture, and other strategies that render language visually accessible. The resulting teaching philosophy, Total Communication (TC), quickly became the dominant approach employed in Deaf education. Yet despite its progressive stance on multilingualism and multimodality, TC ultimately failed to provide deaf students with full access to a natural language. This chapter contrasts the ineffective multilingual practices under TC with characteristically “Deaf ways” of multilingual meaning-making observed among skilled Deaf signers. Excerpts from life story interviews illustrate the impact these practices have for scaffolding learning among Deaf students newly arrived in Sweden. We conclude that prioritizing visually-oriented practices and supporting both students and teachers to become skilled signers offer the best assurance for successful translanguaging in Deaf education without engendering the problems that caused TC to fail.

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

“…In the context of sign languages and deaf education settings, the translanguaging concept has been used to describe bilingual or multilingual pedagogies (Allard and Chen Pichler 2018;García 2009; García and Cole 2014; Holmström and Schönström 2018; Lewis, Jones, and Baker 2012; Swanwick 2017). It has also been used as a framework to describe and/or theorise deaf people's languaging practices in translation projects, shops and markets, village settings, theatre productions, deaf organisations, and language classes for hearing parents (Kusters 2017a; Moriarty Harrelson 2017; Murray 2017; Robinson 2017; Safar 2017; Snoddon 2017).…”

“…A prescriptive use of translanguaging, namely seeing all multimodal communication as equally accessible, or emancipating, overlooks sensorial asymmetries and differential access to semiotic resources but also and crucially, might threaten the vitality and maintenance of sign languages as minority languages. Translanguaging as an idealised pedagogical approach also has risks, given that the majority of teachers teaching deaf students are not proficient in a sign language (Allard and Chen Pichler 2018).…”

“…In the context of the historic and contemporary situation of deaf education, deaf people's lived experiences and the ongoing need for the legal recognition of sign languages, promoting translanguaging could reinforce the argument for the use of deaf educational pedagogies that has often resulted in situations of language deprivation of deaf children because of sensorial inaccessibility to spoken languages (see also Allard and Chen Pichler 2018). The blending of spoken and sign languages in deaf education is not new.…”

The Role of Modality in L2 Learning: The Importance of Learners Acquiring a Second Sign Language (M2L2 and M1L2 Learners)

“…Selection of these structures is modulated by language dominance as well as context. This view is reminiscent of translanguaging, an approach recently expanded to sign language applications (Allard & Chen Pichler, 2018). Holmström and Schönström (2017) use a translanguaging analysis to reveal richly multilingual strategies of a skilled deaf lecturer teaching a university‐level course in Sweden to mixed hearing and deaf students that integrates not only multiple sign languages but also languages in written and spoken form through mouthing and borrowed spoken language terminology.…”

English Translation Ability for Cultivation Mode Based on Multimodal Auxiliary Scaffolding Teaching Method

“…Through classroom observation records, the author found that English classes in colleges and universities are characterized by dogmatization and homogenization [ 6 ]. For example, in one of the classes observed by the author, the teacher first explained new words and introduced relevant background information, then translated and analyzed the text word by word and explained grammar; students were passively listening and taking notes [ 7 ]. The teacher did not give students the opportunity to practice speaking and daily communication in the classroom.…”