This presentation will highlight and discuss the complex situation when deaf adults who are emerging readers (i.e., with limited or no previous knowledge of print literacy) are expected to learn two new languages in parallel: Swedish Sign Language (STS) and Swedish. Swedish appears primarily in its written form for this group, and therefore, they, apart from learning a new language, also have to develop reading and writing skills. In the hearing context, such learning of print literacy in adulthood is a process that is proven difficult by research (see, e.g., Bigelow & Vinogradov 2011 for a compilation). In addition, there is a vast amount of literature on the literacy development of deaf children, reporting that some are struggling with the learning of print literacy while others are successful (e.g., Hoffmeister & Caldwell-Harris 2014). Our study indicates that this is even more complicated for adult deaf emerging readers.

Sweden is a country that highly values education and literacy skills. All schools are free for children and youths, as are university education and non-formal education provided by folk high schools. Those who grow up in Sweden thus have at least public school education grades (9-10 years), and most also have upper secondary school exams (3-4 years). Furthermore, print literacy skills in school are essential, meaning that a large focus is on reading and writing. In recent years, Sweden has received a large number of migrants, of which many have completely different educational experiences. Despite this, all migrants (regardless of whether they are deaf or hearing) who arrive in Sweden are expected to participate in education with the primary goal of learning Swedish (Fejes 2019).

In this presentation, we will present findings from an ongoing multilingual project focusing on adult deaf migrants. As a group, deaf migrants are very heterogeneous regarding linguistic, educational, and social background. Here, we will focus on those deaf migrants who are emerging readers, had limited or no access to a (signed or spoken) language in childhood, and had little or no formal education background before arriving in Sweden. Data comes from ethnographically created video recordings of classroom interaction in folk high schools and interviews with teachers and participants representing this group.

The analysis reveals that while the migrants successively learn basic STS skills that allow them to interact with other deaf people in the personal domain and communicate their needs, the learning of Swedish takes an entirely different path. The migrants highly struggle with learning Swedish, including learning basic reading and writing skills besides vocabulary and grammar. Furthermore, the instruction is highly repetitive, using STS to explain and connect signs with written equivalents. The teachers testify in interviews that it seems almost impossible for them to learn Swedish on a level good enough to cope in Swedish society, which, in turn, puts them in a very vulnerable position.

The presentation will conclude with a discussion about future directions for the research and mark the importance of research on adult deaf emergent readers.

References

Bigelow.M, & Vinogradov, P. (2011). Teaching Adult Second Language LearnersWho Are Emergent Readers. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31, 120–136.

Fejes, A. (2019). Adult education and the fostering of asylum seekersas “full” citizens. International Review of Education, 65, 233–250.

Hoffmeister, R. J., & Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2014). Acquiring English as a second language via print: The task for deaf children. Cognition, 132(2), 229-242.