Examining interactions across language modalities: deaf children and hearing peers at school

Autor/a: KEATING, Elizabeth; MIRUS, Gene
Año: 2003
Editorial: Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 34, nº 2 (2003), pp. 115-135
Tipo de código: Copyright
Soporte: Digital

Temas

Educación, Educación » Adquisición y desarrollo del lenguaje, Educación » Aspectos psicológicos y cognitivos

Detalles

Deaf youth easily become communicatively isolated in public schools, where they are in a small minority among a majority of hearing peers and teachers. This article examines communicative strategies of deaf children in an American "mainstream" school setting to discover how they creatively manage their casual communicative interactions with hearing peers across multimodal communicative channels, visual and auditory. We argue that unshared sociolinguistic practices and hearing‐oriented participation frameworks are crucial aspects of communicative failure in these settings. We also show that what look like "successful" conversational interactions between deaf and hearing children actually contain little real language and few of the complex communication skills vital to cognitive and social development. This study contributes to understanding the social production of communicative isolation of deaf students and implications of mainstream education for this minority group.