CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN
COGNITION & NEUROSCIENCES/ConnexConnex

I will talk about a small-scale project that took place in the North of England in a Local Authority (LA) site for deaf education. The project documented the language landscape of this site and gathered five individual case studies of deaf children to examine their plural and diverse language practices at home and at school. I will discuss the language biographies of the children in the study who live and learn in multilingual environments and reflect on ways of thinking about repertoire and competency in this context.

I will introduce the ways in which I am beginning to analyse the complex multilingual and multimodal communication strategies that enable meaning-making between deaf children and their parents and teachers where there are communication and sensory asymmetries, that is when language experience and resources do not overlap.

Using a short video example to prompt discussion I hope that we can share ideas and approaches to analysing and documenting communication in these contexts.