Examining Multi-Modal Conversational and Narrative Interactions of Deaf Children with Hearing Peers at School
Research Collaborator: Gene Mirus
Research funded by the Spencer Educational Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin Critics of mainstreaming have raised serious questions about the isolation of deaf youth in public schools. Because the majority of deaf students are born to hearing parents who have no sign language skills, these children often arrive in school with severely limited information about the world and poorly developed language skills in both spoken English and sign language. This communicative isolation can lead to cognitive, social and emotional impairments and affect how deaf students learn. Deaf students struggle in trying to communicate with and learn from hearing teachers, hearing parents, and hearing peers. We are conducting an ethnographic study of communicative strategies of deaf children in mainstream classrooms in order to discover how they manage their day-to-day communicative interactions with hearing peers, across multimodal communicative channels, sign and speech.
Publications Resulting from the Project
| 2003 | |
| 2001 | Keating, Elizabeth and Gene Mirus. Cross Modal Conversations: Deaf Children and Hearing Peers at School. Crossroads of Language, Interaction, and Culture Conference Proceedings, Department of Applied Linguistics and TESL UCLA. |
Papers Presented
| 2000 | Deaf Children and Hearing Peers at School: Negotiating Conversational Resources, University of California, Los Angeles (Paper presented by Gene Mirus) |
| 2000 | Looking at Deaf-Hearing Interactions and the Impact of Technology on Language Practices, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany. |
| 2000 | Current Research. Colloquium Linguisticum, Bremen University, Bremen, Germany. |