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Applying a human rights perspective on plurilingualism as a national as well as a transnational concern, with a focus on the interaction taking place in foreign language teaching and learning practices at a Swedish Special Needs School for pupils with deafness or impaired hearing, the overall aim of this study is to describe and discuss this interaction in performative terms, i.e. in terms of what is said by whom, to whom, why, and with what consequences. Although extensive research has already been carried out within the field of plurilingualism, for example from linguistic, sociological and political points of departure, research on plurilingualism with regard to foreign language teaching and learning interaction in Swedish sign language contexts has been largely missing. The ambition of this work, therefore, is to add to the diversity of research on plurilingualism. It is also hoped that this work will contribute to the debate in educational politics concerning a human rights perspective on plurilingualism, especially with regard to modern European languages as a transnational issue. Methodologically, an ethnographic approach has been employed to document, by means of two video cameras in combination with field notes, the practices of communication emerging from teacherstudent interaction. Using notions from Conversational Analysis and alongside established conventions of sign language transcription, a model of transcription was designed for the specific purpose of describing, in detail, the plurilingual interaction where Swedish sign language is used as a mediating tool. Three lessons in English and four lessons – or lesson extracts – in Spanish, at secondary level in a Special Needs School for pupils with deafness or impaired hearing, have been documented and analysed. The analyses were carried out in two different steps, one describing and one discussing the results of the empirical investigation. The institutionally formalised interaction observed appears to have contributed to the heavy dominance of the teacher, and of the IRE sequence used during the lessons, to a much greater extent than students’ deafness or impaired hearing. Although the aims and objectives of the curricular texts intended for these students, as well as for hearing ones, are expressed in communicative terms – for example, learning to read texts of relatively high complexity, or developing writing skills for communication across linguistic boundaries – almost all the lessons that were investigated concerned the translation of isolated words into sign language, often taken out of their English or Spanish context. Nonetheless, the students took part in the classroom interaction when protesting, joking, asking questions and helping each other. Thus, the teacher dominance noted does not imply suppression, but rather a tendency on the part of the teacher to underestimate the students, as well as reflecting a selective tradition within foreign language teaching and learning practices in a general Swedish school context. However, when viewed from a human rights perspective on future plurilingual European citizens, using their language skills to reach out into the world for mutual understanding, the students involved in the language teaching and learning interaction observed in this study may hardly be expected to reach out across linguistic boundaries, at least not as a result of the language education they have experienced.

Identifying word classes is an important part of describing a language. Research about sign languages often lack distinctions crucial for identifying word classes, e.g. the difference between sign and gesture. Additionally, sign languages typically lack written form, something that often constrains quantitative research on sign language to the use of glosses translated to the spoken language in the area. In this thesis, such glosses have been extracted from The Swedish Sign Language Corpus. The glosses were mapped to utterances based on Swedish translations in the corpus, and these utterances served as input data to a word space model, producing a co-occurence matrix. This matrix was clustered with the K-means algorithm. The extracted utterances were also clustered with the Brown algorithm. By using V-measure, the clusters were compared to a gold standard annotated manually with word classes. The Brown algorithm performs significantly better in inducing word classes than a random baseline. This work shows that utilizing unsupervised learning is a feasible approach for doing research on word classes in Swedish Sign Language. However, future studies of this kind should employ a deeper linguistic analysis of the language as a part of choosing the algorithms.

Previous studies on children’s acquisition of depicting verbs in signed languages have chiefly studied the use of classifiers in verbs of motion and location, particularly the order in which the different classes of handshape are acquired. The age of the children in these studies have ranged from age three to thirteen, and an important finding has been that classifier constructions are not fully acquired until early adolescence. Most of these studies have used an elicitation tool to investigate the production and comprehension of classifiers, but have not provided any adult target norms of the test items when scoring children’s achievement. The present dissertation provides a detailed description of both adults’ and children’s verb constructions in descriptions of cutting and breaking events in Swedish Sign Language (SSL), specifically focusing on the number of hands used in signing, handshape category and hand activity, which has not been previously described for any sign language. As part of this study, 14 deaf adults (ages 20–72) and 11 deaf children (2;1–6;6) of deaf parents, all native-users of SSL, performed a task that involved describing 53 video clips of cutting and breaking events. The clips show an event in which an actor separates material, either with the aid of a tool or without. Additionally, some clips show an entity separating by itself without an actor being involved. The adults described the events with depicting verb constructions that are produced with two hands. The analysis of the handshapes produced three categories: substitutor, manipulator and descriptor. The most frequent construction in the description of events without a tool was two acting manipulators (depicting a hand handling an object), whereas in descriptions of events with a tool the combinations were acting substitutor or manipulator with a non-acting manipulator. The acting hand referred to the tool and the non-acting manipulator to the affected entity. In descriptions of events without an actor, either two substitutors or two manipulators were used. In addition to depicting verb constructions, the descriptions also contained resultative complements, i.e. signs carrying information about the result of the activity being carried out. The complements were either lexical signs or some form of depicting verb construction. Similar observations have not been noted for any other signed language. In the manner of the adults, the children used depicting verb constructions in descriptions of cutting and breaking events (681 tokens), but they also used pointing and lexical signs (64 tokens). Nearly half of the verb constructions that were used by the children corresponded to the adult target forms. The majority of the constructions describing events without a tool corresponded to the adult target forms using two acting manipulators, even among the youngest informants. In events with a tool, only a third of the constructions corresponded to the adult target forms (emerging at 4;8 – 5;0); the remaining two-thirds were deviating constructions in terms of number of hands, handshape category and hand activity. Resultative complement are sparsely used by children (57 tokens), the most chosen type of complement being lexical signs. Pervasive features of children’s constructions were the addition of contact between the hands and a preference for substitutors, something not found in adults’ constructions. These features were elucidated within the framework of Real Space blending theory, with the study showing that children first use visible blended entities and that invisible blended entities do not emerge until 4;8–5;0. / <p>Disputationen teckenspråkstolkas</p>

The aim of this two years master thesis is to explore the relationship between public libraries and deaf adults. I want to know if deaf adults are a prioritized group in Swedish public libraries. Deaf adults use Swedish sign language witch is a visual language and differs from Swedish. I discuss the difference in Swedish Sign Language and Swedish and the importance of Sign Language literature. I also explore what methods can be used for mak-ing the library service towards the deaf group more customer centered and service oriented.The lack of sign language knowledge among the library personnel can lead to communication barriers. I want to illustrate these communication barriers, both psychological and semantic barriers, with Richard Dimble-by and Graeme Burton´s interpersonal communication theory. The psychological barriers consist of negative attitudes and prejudices. In this case these psychological barriers prevent the libraries from further proceedings with the marketing of their service, all based on the notion of deaf being uninterested in library service. This, on the other hand, leads to deaf people not knowing what public libraries can offer and therefor has become some-what of an invisible group in the libraries today.I performed ten surveys on ten public libraries in Sweden and a more detailed questioner to Teckenhörnan in Örebro public library. Thees surveys was done based on the IFLA Guidelines for Service for Deaf People. The result of this survey shows that deaf adults are not a prioritized group in public libraries. The lack of knowledge among library personnel about deafness, sign language and an understanding of the situation of deaf people is an obstacle. It is important to separate deaf from other disabled groups since deaf is more a linguistic minority then a disabled group.

This dissertation examines the language proficiency of school-aged deaf pupils from a bilingual perspective. The first aim of the study is to investigate the Swedish L2 skills of the pupils. This includes testing the validity of the Processability Theory on deaf learners of Swedish as an L2. The second aim is to investigate whether there is a correlation between proficiency in Swedish and Swedish Sign Language (SSL) as suggested in earlier research on deaf bilingualism. This study is cross-sectional and contains data from 38 pupils (grades 5 and 10) from a school for deaf and hearing-impaired pupils in Sweden. The data consists of retellings of a cartoon in written Swedish and of free stories in SSL. For the first part of the study, the Swedish data has been analyzed according to Processability Theory (PT).  For the second part of the study, narrative structure in both the Swedish and SSL data has been analyzed. As a theoretical framework, Labov’s narrative model is applied. The results show that there is an implicational order in the informants’ development of Swedish following the predicted grammatical learning order described by PT. The results therefore suggest that PT is a valid theory also for deaf learners of L2 Swedish. The conclusions regarding SSL proficiency suggest that more research about sign language as such is needed to get a deeper understanding of SSL proficiency. The results show that one narrative component of Labov’s model - Evaluation - is an important component in SSL proficiency. The results from the comparative analysis show that there is a positive statistical correlation between some Swedish and SSL variables used in this study, suggesting that skills in Swedish correlate with skills in SSL. This means that a well-developed sign language is important for the deaf to learn any written language as a second language.

Detta är en korpusundersökning av tankepausen spelande fingrar i svenskt teckenspråk. Ett förslag på indelning av tankepauser presenteras samt hur frekvent olika tankepauser förekommer. Spelande fingrar är den tredje största kategorin av tankepauser i materialet, de allra flesta tankepauser med spelande fingrar förekommer inuti en samtalstur och majoriteten av alla reparationer i samband med spelande fingrar är lyckade reparationer. / This is a corpus-based study of the hesitation paus wiggly-fingers in Swedish sign language. A suggestion how to categorise hesitation pauses are presented and how often different kind of hesitation pauses appears. Wiggly-fingers is the third biggest group of hesitation pauses in in the corpus, the majority of pauses with wiggly-fingers appears within a turn of conversation and a majority of all the repairs connected to wiggly-fingers are successful repairs.

The aim of this study is to qualitatively point out a variation of perceptions among the including strategies in swedish sign language environments. The environments involve both preschools and special schools, because preschools are the first step of a lifelong learning process that is coherent with schools. Including involves not only being there physically in the environment but also being able to communicate via technical options and visual availability. The study is grounded on 11 semi structured interviews via telephone which are analyzed by a phenomenographic method. The respondents are preschool teachers, teachers, specialized educators, head of preschool and nannies. The method includes a pilot interview before the actual interviews to make sure that the questions are of good quality. Discussion related to swedish preschool curriculum and children's own perspective occurs throughout the study. But also an angle on the data via visual and auditory perspectives. In our study we have been able to see diversity in the respondents perceptions on including strategies. This means that there are varying direct inclusion opportunities for the children in the current environments. A diversity that may or may not be equivalent to children's individual needs. Proposals for further research is presented with alternatives for both qualitative and quantitative studies. The conclusion of the study is that strategies for inclusion are perceived differently depending on the staffs view of inclusion. With different perspectives of the concept, different including strategies are also used with children in practice and in the environment. It is advantageous in the Swedish sign language environment to access children’s own language, which includes an accessible environment that should be based on the child’s needs. A common aspect points to children’s inclusion to the extent that staff offer children inclusion. Regardless of children’s existence in the environment, children’s inclusion cannot take place unless staff are deliberately working to include all children despite requirements.

<p>Denna uppsats behandlar läsförståelse i svenskundervisningen för döva. Syftet har varit att få en uppfattning om lärares syn på läsförståelse, deras erfarenheter kring döva läsare och deras arbete med läsförståelse i svenskundervisningen för döva. Mina informanter är lärare och de undervisar på riksgymnasiet för döva. Metoden har varit kvalitativa intervjuer. Jag har varit intresserad av lärarnas kunskaper och erfarenheter samt åsikter och därför har jag valt denna metod.</p><p>Läsförståelse innebär enligt informanterna utvunna upplevelser utifrån texten kopplade till läsarens tidigare erfarenheter. Enligt merparten av informanterna är det inte så stora skillnader mellan vana döva läsare och vana hörande läsare. När det gäller ovana döva läsare kan element i texten som fraser, homonymer, synonymer, referensbindningar och verbpartiklar vålla problem. De har ofta svårt att uppfatta kontexten i texten. I fråga om undervisningen handlar mycket om elevernas redan förvärvade kunskaper och erfarenheter samt intressen, enligt informanterna. Det gäller för läraren att börja där eleven befinner sig. Informanterna betonar bland annat texter med rimlig nivå. En stor del av texten skall eleverna kunna känna till och resten skall vara nytt. På så sätt blir läsningen träning. Annat som informanterna betonar är samtal mellan lärare och elev kring texten. Sålunda kan mycket bli klargörande för eleven. Högläsning, vilken sker på svenskt teckenspråk, kan ge förståelse av textens innebörd men fungerar framförallt som ett redskap för att framkalla läsintresse och nyfikenhet hos eleverna.</p><p>När det gäller lärarens förkunskaper betonar informanterna kunskaper i och om svenskt teckenspråk och svenska språket. Kunskaper om andraspråksinlärning och om svenskundervisningen för hörande kan vara viktiga.</p><p>Nyckelord: Läsning, Läsförståelse, Svenskt teckenspråk, Svenska som andraspråk, Döva</p>

<p>The aim of this study is to establish an understanding of how the concept educational materials can be interpreted, as well as to investigate how teachers describe their use of educational materials. The focus of this study is the subject “Sign Language for the hearing”, at the upper secondary level. We, the authors of this essay, both have a great personal interest in this language. Swedish Sign Language is the sign language mainly used in Sweden. In colloquial conversation, Swedish Sign Language is often called “Sign Language”, as American Sign Language is often called Sign Language in the USA. Swedish Sign Language is referred to as Sign Language in the current curriculum for the compulsory school and the non-compulsory school, which explains the title of this essay. Although this essay does not focus on research concerning the linguistic qualities of Swedish Sign Language, but we still wish to emphasize that sign language is not one, international, language.</p><p>The results presented in this study are derived from the collected knowledge mediated through a field study, in which eight teachers, with experience of working with the subject Sign Language for the hearing, have described their thoughts and experiences of the meaning of the concept educational materials, and how they explain that they use educational materials. These results are put in relation to curriculums, past and present, as well as previous litterature about educational materials.</p><p>By analysing the answers given by the teachers, who particiated in this study field, the curriculums are said to affect how they work with educational materials. The results of the field study comfirm the historical interpretation of educational materials as synonymous with a text-book. This being said, the participants in this study state that they have a wider understanding of the concept in relation to the subject Sign Language for the hearing. They explain that this is due to the fact that there is no text-book to work with, within the subject. They further describe that they work with different forms of experiences, such as theater, educational visits and interviews, in order to induce their students’ interest to want to learn and commuicate by using the language.</p>