The burden of sustaining communication: communication breakdowns experienced by deaf students and their communication support workers in a further education college

Iturriaga, Cristian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0081-8692 (2024) The burden of sustaining communication: communication breakdowns experienced by deaf students and their communication support workers in a further education college. Language, Culture and Curriculum. ISSN 0790-8318

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Abstract

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 disparities found in educational settings. This ethnographic study explored episodes of communication breakdown in communicative interactions of 5 deaf college students in a further education college in Northern England. Analysis coded what was the source of breakdown, who noticed it, who repaired communication and what strategy was used. Findings were organised into three themes, reflecting how breakdowns were dealt with either by deaf students or their Communication Support Workers, or as a shared concern with teaching staff. Overall, deaf students were noted to deal with miscommunication through translanguaging, deploying their multilingual and multimodal repertoires to engage with multiple audiences and repair communication. Findings reflect how deaf students are overburdened with responsibility for ensuring communication is sustained, which opens further questions regarding the pressure to assimilate to hearing normative ways of communicating. Restricting deaf students’ communication to English may limit their development as bi/multilinguals and their learning experiences.