Abstract
Deaf sign language signers are often regarded as having limited resources with which to learn languages. Such a view can be identified as an authoritative discourse. However, recent empirical studies on communication-practices among signers do not support such a view. These studies show that abundant multilingual and multimodal resources exist for signers with which to learn languages. This chapter demonstrates, through a case study of ‘Hanna’, how a deaf Finnish Sign Language signer becomes aware of the conflict between a dominant, authoritative discourse and the everyday actions she takes with English language. This rupture of the taken-for-grantedness during an interview shapes the way Hanna positions herself as an English language learner. Further, the research presented in this chapter argues that such moments of self-revelation offer possibilities for the emergence of reverse discourses that may question and replace dominant discourses.
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- 1.
I have chosen to consistently use ‘signer’ when referring to people who participate in signing environments, for example at home or at school, and of whose historical body a sign language has become an integral part.
- 2.
In spring 2016, the global audience on the internet and the social media witnessed a heated discussion which began when the president of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing accused Nyle DiMarco, a famous deaf celebrity and activist promoting American Sign Language, of spreading myths about deafness. The open letter published by the association was opposed by a number of researchers and deaf people and highlighted research on the benefits of bilingualism in signed and spoken language.
- 3.
As the teacher of the course, my aim was to communicate to the course participants that making mistakes is completely acceptable and mistakes can be used as a source for efficient language learning. For this reason, I named the course Hedgedog after my own mistake of calling a hedgedog, a mistake that had made me recognise the word hedge in hedgehog.
- 4.
The interview was done in FinSL and video recorded with a single camera. First, I recorded my simultaneous interpretation of the interview into spoken Finnish while watching the video recording. After that the spoken interpretation was transcribed into written Finnish, and the Finnish transcription was translated into written English. The final step for producing the transcription was to watch the original FinSL video and modify the English translation to be equivalent to the original FinSL signing. Hanna herself has read and commented on my translations, after which minor changes have been made both to the Finnish and English translations.
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Tapio, E. (2017). A Moment of Self-Revelation as a Turning Point in Understanding Language Learning. In: Bagga-Gupta, S., Hansen, A., Feilberg, J. (eds) Identity Revisited and Reimagined. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58056-2_14
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