In many countries across the world education for deaf people is limited and sign languages are undervalued. In this paper we discuss insights from an initiative to support deaf education for young adults in India, Ghana, and Uganda. Reporting here on the work in India, our project used a bilingual approach, with Indian Sign Language as the main…

Like language teachers everywhere, Deaf teachers of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) had to suddenly move classes online when COVID-19 restrictions were implemented from March 2020. NZSL is conventionally taught through a direct immersion, communicative approach, so adapting instruction to a remote mode required NZSL teachers to develop new…

Disabled people encounter numerous barriers to accessibility and face discrimination and inequalities in their daily lives. The situation is even more complex for migrants with a disability, who have to learn how to navigate a new bureaucratic system. This study focuses on deaf adult migrants and the linguistic and bureaucratic challenges they…

Interpreters are some of the most important people in the lives of our deaf and hard of hearing students, yet hiring and retention requirements are weak, variable, or nonexistent. Despite this, many school interpreters have become skillful and effective professionals driven by their desire for competence and sense of integrity. State employment…

Background: Opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities to become bi/multilingual tend not to be widely available despite demonstrated linguistic and extralinguistic advantages associated with an ability to use more than one language. This article focuses on the learning experiences of students with intellectual disabilities in…

The educational inclusion of deaf students in England is usually interpreted as placement in mainstream settings alongside hearing students, creating unintended pressure for assimilation to the communicative needs of hearing people. In this context, it is deaf students and their communication support staff who are left to deal with communicative…

This paper discusses the role of mediation as it arose in developing and teaching two online American Sign Language (ASL) courses for parents of deaf children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaf children and their families who are still acquiring ASL have ongoing learning needs that are most often not met in mainstream educational systems, and…

Online learning has grown substantially in recent years, and there has been an emphasis among administrators, instructors, and researchers alike to better understand what drives student success in their online courses. Success in online learning is also a concern for deaf students, who face unique challenges in online courses. This survey-based…

Sign languages present particular challenges to language assessors in relation to variation in signs, weakly defined citation forms, and a general lack of standard-setting work even in long-established measures of productive sign proficiency. The present article addresses and explores these issues via a mixed-methods study of a human-rated…

This study investigates practices around the bestowal of personal sign names to adult New Zealand Sign Language learners, from both teachers' and students' perspectives. Key findings include that, (1) learners receive similar types of sign names to deaf signers but in different proportions; (2) getting a sign name is regarded as a significant…

Social interaction, and the attendant negotiation of meaning, is of prime importance for developing second language (L2) skills. Yet how learners go about building L2 social networks -- and why some have more success than others in doing so -- remains underexplored. This article explores this phenomenon via a 12-month longitudinal case study of…

In recent years, robots have increasingly been implemented as tutors in both first- and second-language education. The field of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) is developing rapidly. Studies have been published targeting different languages, age groups, and aspects of language and using different robots and methodologies. The present…

The view of sign languages as bounded systems is often important for deaf community empowerment and for pedagogical practice in terms of supporting deaf children's language acquisition and second language learners' communicative competence. Conversely, the notion of translanguaging in the American Sign Language (ASL) community highlights a number…

Enabling pedagogy and andragogy is discussed as a form of lifelong learning in which learners attain competences and skills as children (pedagogy) and as adults (andragogy) that enable them to engage in independent learning in the 21st century. Throughout the article the author avoids as much as possible the labels "deaf" and…

Understanding how language modality (i.e., signed vs. spoken) affects second language outcomes in hearing adults is important both theoretically and pedagogically, as it can determine the specificity of second language (L2) theory and inform how best to teach a language that uses a new modality. The present study investigated which…