Monthly Lunchtime Research Discussion, Ruth Swanwick

Monthly Lunchtime Research Discussions: 24th September 2014, Leeds Humanities Research Institute, Seminar Room 1.

Deaf children’s multilinguality and multimodality and multicompetence, Ruth Swanwick.

This paper explores the concepts of multilinguality, multimodality and multicompetence with reference to bimodal bilingual deaf children. I aim to give an overview of the bimodal bilingual language repertoires that deaf learners bring to the learning context, including their mixed and blended use of sign and spoken language. I will outline some of the key questions for research and educational practice, with a particular focus on 'translanguaging' and the relevance of this term to the deaf education context. I will mention current work in progress on developing an ecological approach to language planning, which captures current ‘language landscapes’ as well as individual language profiles. I hope that this introduction will generate some discussion and ideas about possible connections between the language, learning and deafness research planned with work ongoing within the Language@Leeds group and the potential of some new collaborations.

Dr Ruth Swanwick

Senior Lecturer in Deaf Education, School of Education University of Leeds, LS2 9JT

Tel: 0113 343 4582