Acceso usuarios
Colleen Böhringer
, Claudine Storbeck
As much as there have been significant developments in the adoption of the bilingual-bicultural approach to education in South African schools for deaf children and establishing South African Sign Language (SASL) as a right, research has shown that there is still a lack of clarity among teachers of deaf learners on how SASL and English are to be used. This study observed and documented the modes of communication in three English literature classrooms at three schools, each with a different approach to teaching in a bilingual-bicultural context. It offers a thick description of the modes of communication, recognising the fluid language practices of deaf learners and revealing that there are English classrooms where: (a) neither the teacher nor the learners have a common academic language that they are sufficiently proficient in; (b) the teacher is able to use SASL and English as academic languages but the learners are not sufficiently proficient in English to engage at the level that the teacher is expecting; and (c) both SASL and English are visually accessible and both the teachers and learners are sufficiently proficient in both languages as linguistic resources for them to be used as effective semiotic resources.
