The aim of this study was to examine how sign language policies are being implemented in special schools for the Deaf in Zimbabwe. It employed in-depth interviews to solicit data from 29 participants who were four district school inspectors, four educational psychologists, four school heads and 17 grade one to three specialist teachers. Data were…

Sociolinguistic awareness is crucial for L2 learners because language is not just a set of grammatical rules and vocabulary; it is deeply intertwined with social and cultural context. The linguistic landscape serves as a conduit for discerning facets of language use in a given community. This study focuses on raising sociolinguistic awareness…

This study followed the development of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) proficiency in 31 deaf bimodal bilingual children (kindergarten through Primary 6) over two years. The Hong Kong Sign Language Elicitation Tool (HKSL-ET) was used at three time points to elicit the production of agreement, classifier, modal, negation, and wh-question structures.…

Purpose: Best practices recommend promoting the use of the home language and allowing caregivers to choose the language(s) that they want to use with their child who is deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). We examined whether Spanish-speaking caregivers of children who are DHH receive professional recommendations on oral bilingualism that follow best…

While it is common for deaf children to be bilingual in a spoken and signed language, studies often attribute any delays in language acquisition to language deprivation, rather than as a result of cross-linguistic interaction. This study compares the production of simple sentences in three languages (Palestinian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and…

The study is aimed at exploring Master's students' sense-making of various second language (L2) texts and its correlation with interpretation depth and the students' intercultural competence. The significance of this research lies in the fact that it provides an insight on culture-specific issues challenging for advanced and proficient Ukrainian…

A "heritage language" is defined as a minority language that differs from the dominant language used in a particular community. Codas (children of Deaf adults) who sign but may be dominant in the spoken language of their community present an interesting case due to the added difference of a spoken/signed modality in their linguistic…

The name of the worship place is closely related to history, ideology, power, and society. Naming a worship place is a symbol of how power is represented through text in public spaces. This study aims to look at an environmental print by investigating the performance of religions in Malang, Indonesia, through the use of language in the names of…

There has been a scarcity of studies exploring the influence of students' American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency on their academic achievement in ASL/English bilingual programs. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of ASL proficiency on reading comprehension skills and academic achievement of 85 deaf or hard-of-hearing signing…

This study explores the impact of bimodal bilingual parental input on the communication and language development of a young deaf child. The participants in this case study were a severe-to-profoundly deaf boy and his hearing parents, who were enrolled in a bilingual (English and Australian Sign Language) homebased early intervention programme. The…

This article brings together salient findings regarding communication and identity through studies of everyday social practices, studies of discourses about these practices and policy documents pertaining to special schools from "previous" and "ongoing" ethnographic projects based at the KKOM-DS (Communication, Culture and…

This book provides comprehensive information on all aspects of sociolinguistics. It includes 285 articles, of which 80 are short biographical entries. Fifty of the biographies and 42 other articles are entirely new, while the remaining entries are revised and updated from the "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics." The book provides…