Deaf lecturers’ translanguaging in a higher education setting: A multimodal multilingual perspective
Temas
Detalles
In a few universities around the world courses are offered where theprimary language of instruction is a national sign language. Many of thesecourses are given by bilingual/multilingual deaf lecturers, skilled in bothnational sign language(s) and spoken/written language(s). Research on suchdeaf-led practices in higher education are lacking, and this study will contributeto a greater understanding of these practices. Drawing on ethnographicallycreated data from a higher education setting in Sweden, this case study exam-ines the use of different languages and modalities by three deaf lecturers whenteaching deaf and hearing (signing) students in theoretic subjects. The analysisis based on video-recordings of the deaf lecturers during classroom activities at abasic university level in which Swedish Sign Language (SSL) is used as theprimary language. The results illustrate how these deaf lecturers creatively usediverse semiotic resources in several modes when teaching deaf and hearing(signing) students, which creates practices of translanguaging. This is illustratedby classroom activities in which the deaf lecturers use different language andmodal varieties, including sign languages SSL and ASL as well as Swedish, andEnglish, along with PowerPoint and whiteboard notes. The characteristics ofthese multimodal-multilingual resources and the usage of them will be closelypresented in this article.