Translanguaging is often regarded with great skepticism in the context of Deaf education, as an approach that has already been
tried, with disastrous results. Already in the 1960’s educators understood the critical importance of allowing deaf children to
exploit their full linguistic repertoire for learning: not only listening, lip-reading and reading/writing, but also sign
language, fingerspelling, gesture, and other strategies that render language visually accessible. The resulting teaching
philosophy, Total Communication (TC), quickly became the dominant approach employed in Deaf education. Yet despite its progressive
stance on multilingualism and multimodality, TC ultimately failed to provide deaf students with full access to a natural language.
This chapter contrasts the ineffective multilingual practices under TC with characteristically “Deaf ways” of multilingual
meaning-making observed among skilled Deaf signers. Excerpts from life story interviews illustrate the impact these practices have
for scaffolding learning among Deaf students newly arrived in Sweden. We conclude that prioritizing visually-oriented practices
and supporting both students and teachers to become skilled signers offer the best assurance for successful translanguaging in
Deaf education without engendering the problems that caused TC to fail.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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