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This book is the second of two volumes on deaf multiliteracies based on research with deaf children and adults in India, Uganda and Ghana. Multiliteracies include not only reading and writing but also skills in sign language, drawing, acting, digitally mediated communication, and other modes. The book covers a variety of themes including learner engagement, classroom practice, capacity building, and education systems. Authors discuss aspects of learning such as the sequencing of different multiliteracies skills in the classroom, a gamified approach to English grammar, a sign-bilingual online environment, and the influence of visual materials on learners' participation. Capacity building with young deaf professionals and a comparative discussion of deaf education systems in three countries also feature in the volume. The book is of interest to both researchers and practitioners. In addition to four research chapters, it features four 'innovation sketches'. These are reports of innovative practices that have arisen in the context of the research, and they are particularly relevant for practitioners with an interest in methodologies

“Making meaning”: Communication between sign language users without a shared language

In a small group of deaf sign language users from different countries and with no shared language, the signers’ initial conversational interactions are investigated as they meet in pairs for the very first time. This case study allows for a unique insight into the initial stages of pidginisation and the conceptual processes involved. The participants use a wide range of linguistic and communicative resources, and it can be argued that they construct shared multilingual-multimodal cognitive spaces for the purpose of these conversations. This research explores the nature of these shared multilingual-multimodal spaces, how they are shaped by the signers in interaction, and how they can be understood in terms of conceptual blending. The research also focuses on the meta-linguistic skills that signers use in these multilingual-multimodal interactions to “make meaning”

Serious Games in Co-creative Facilitation

Serious Games have become popular in recent years and are being used in an increasing range of contexts, including education, business, design, corporate training, healthcare, the military, management, public services, and others. A Serious Game is defined as any game that is used for purposes other than entertainment, i.e. for a serious purpose (hence the terminology). This book describes the motivation, design, and development of Serious Games for use in face-to-face, low-resource contexts. Based on experiences from various field sites, it is shown how and why the games work in order to facilitate co-creative processes with groups of participants. The effects on group communication and on creating a non-threatening, egalitarian environment are discussed. While originally designed for cross-sectoral work with deaf communities in India, the games have also been transferred to other contexts. Several case studies demonstrate how games can be embedded in complex sequences of activities, and the book ends with future perspectives on the development of Serious Games. The book includes an appendix with detailed instructions for all games, which practitioners will find useful

READ WRITE EASY

This book is the second of two volumes on deaf multiliteracies based on research with deaf children and adults in India, Uganda and Ghana. Multiliteracies include not only reading and writing but also skills in sign language, drawing, acting, digitally mediated communication, and other modes. The book covers a variety of themes including learner engagement, classroom practice, capacity building, and education systems. Authors discuss aspects of learning such as the sequencing of different multiliteracies skills in the classroom, a gamified approach to English grammar, a sign-bilingual online environment, and the influence of visual materials on learners' participation. Capacity building with young deaf professionals and a comparative discussion of deaf education systems in three countries also feature in the volume. The book is of interest to both researchers and practitioners. In addition to four research chapters, it features four 'innovation sketches'. These are reports of innovative practices that have arisen in the context of the research, and they are particularly relevant for practitioners with an interest in methodologies

Sign-speaking: The structure of simultaneous bimodal utterances

We present data from a bimodal trilingual situation involving Indian Sign Language (ISL), Hindi and English. Signers are co-using these languages while in group conversations with deaf people and hearing non-signers. The data show that in this context, English is an embedded language that does not impact on the grammar of the utterances, while both ISL and Hindi structures are realised throughout. The data show mismatches between the simultaneously expressed ISL and Hindi, such that semantic content and/or syntactic structures are different in both languages, yet are produced at the same time. The data also include instances of different propositions expressed simultaneously in the two languages. This under-documented behaviour is called “sign-speaking” here, and we explore its implications for theories of multilingualism, code-switching, and bilingual language production

Positive signs – How sign language typology benefits deaf communities and linguistic theory

Sign language typology is the systematic comparative study of linguistic structures across sign languages, and has emerged as a separate linguistic sub-discipline over the past 15 years. It is situated at the crossroads between linguistic typology and sign language linguistics, the latter itself a relatively young discipline with its roots in the 1960s and 70s (McBurney 2001). The cross-fertilisation initiated by the advent of sign language typology is obvious: Typologists gain an entirely new dimension in their study of linguistic diversity, and sign language linguists gain a rich tool box of concepts and methods for discovering typological patterns across sign languages. Beyond theory and methodology, the impact that sign language typology research has on the deaf communities who are the primary users of these languages is discussed in Section 2. Section 3 discusses some areas in which sign language typology has made unique contributions to linguistic theory and has prompted discussions that may otherwise not have come to the surface

Two languages at hand: Code-switching in bilingual deaf signers

This article explores patterns of co-use of two sign languages in casual conversational data from four deaf bilinguals, who are fluent in Indian Sign Language (ISL) and Burundi Sign Language (BuSL). We investigate the contributions that both sign languages make to these conversations at lexical, clause, and discourse level, including a distinction between signs from closed grammatical classes and open lexical classes. The results show that despite individual differences between signers, there are also striking commonalities. Specifically, we demonstrate the shared characteristics of the signers’ bilingual outputs in the domains of negation, where signers prefer negators found in both sign languages, and wh-questions, where signers choose BuSL for specific question words and ISL for general wh-questions. The article thus makes the argument that these signers have developed a fairly stable bilingual variety that is characteristic of this particular community of practice, and we explore theoretical implications arising from these patterns