Research: Bilingual Education for deaf children

SASL translation

BSL translation

About this project

Bilingual Education is often proposed as best practice in Deaf Education internationally, combining the country's signed language and spoken and/or written language. Despite this conceptual clarity and agreement, a shared understanding of pedagogical implementation remains elusive, evidenced in the continued lag in deaf children’s educational outcomes world-wide. In this project we begin to explore teachers’ beliefs, perceptions and pedagogical experiences of Bilingual Deaf Education, with a pilot project in South Africa and Scotland aiming to explore both concept and practice in order to set a foundation in place for potential future projects working in other African countries and in Scotland.

As two multilingual countries, South Africa and Scotland have a vested interest in ensuring our deaf learners grow up multilingual, so the focus on bilingualism is of particular interest to our two Departments.

Research questions

How do teachers of deaf children - both deaf and hearing – define Bilingual Education within the deaf education context?

What are the current bilingual pedagogies that teachers of the deaf - both hearing and deaf - use in Scotland and South Africa when teaching deaf children?

Survey

We are creating a survey available in English, British Sign Language, South African Sign Language, written Zulu and written Afrikaans. The survey is aimed at teachers of deaf children working in South Africa and Scotland who use a bilingual approach to some extent or a lot.

We are not only asking qualified teachers of deaf children to respond, because in both countries there are many deaf people working in educational roles with deaf children and we are keen to gather their views too. In Scotland there is also a group of deaf teachers of deaf children who are qualified teachers of deaf children or in training. For this reason, we have designed the survey so that it can be answered in any of the survey languages relevant to each country. Teachers can upload clips of themselves signing responses, or can write in their preferred language. They can also choose to change languages for different questions.

We estimate that the survey will take about half an hour to complete. It is only open to teachers in Scotland and South Africa. The survey will close on 30th June 2022.

Professor Claudine Storbeck started the Centre for Deaf Studies (CFDS) at the University of the Witwatersrand 25 years ago, and developed the first teacher training programme for teachers of the deaf in South Africa. A key strength of the CFDS is the Bilingual Bicultural team of deaf and hearing academics.

Rachel O’Neill worked in deaf education in sign bilingual settings for 25 years, and now trains Teachers of the Deaf at the University of Edinburgh. Rachel co-edits the peer- reviewed Taylor and Francis journal Deafness & Education International.

Robyn Swannack The University of Witwatersrand Centre for Deaf Studies, Deaf PhD student. Robyn is a Research Assistant on the project and has also translated the survey into South African Sign Language.

Colleen Bohringer recent Masters graduate from the The University of Witwatersrand Centre for Deaf Studies. Colleen has produced a literature review on bilingual education and teacher views.

Irma Maré REDCap manager at the University of Witwatersrand. She has built the multilingual survey for the project.

Nenio Mbazima Video producer at the Centre for Deaf Studies (CFDS). He is the author of two books, Strong Wind which won three literature awards and Sesame's Adventure, a children’s book.

Lesley McGilp Deaf registered British Sign Language translator has translated the survey into British Sign Language.

Olwethu Magama Zulu translator for our project. In addition to being a translator she also works as a community interventionist.

Annette Sonntag Translator from English into Afrikaans. She also works for the Centre for Deaf Studies at Witwatersrand University.