Exploring the communicative repertoire of a signing deaf adolescent
Embargo Date
2028-01-14
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This ethnographic case study explores a signing deaf adolescent’s (Brady, age 16) practices through careful, close study of his communicative interactions with limited-signing others (parents, friends, strangers) in everyday life. The study centers joint interactions with and around texts broadly defined to include graphic novels, text messages, digital media, images, maps, and drawings. The analysis takes a sociocultural approach, framed by studies of deaf individuals’ semiotic repertoires (Kusters et al., 2017), ethnographies of home and community literacies, and Goodwin’s (2018) co-operative action theory. Findings illuminated the ways in which Brady navigated the hearing world by creatively and dynamically drawing on a variety of resources in his environments. He drew from an expansive semiotic repertoire, which included a dynamic combination of sign, talk, images, technology, gesture, pointing, gaze, movement, body orientation, and the manipulation of objects (Goodwin, 2000). Findings also illustrated the parents’ different orientations to Brady, their joint interactions, ASL and other languages, and the semiotic field. In particular, the analysis highlighted Mom’s sensibility of ongoing attunement to her son—his languages, his development and growth, and his expanding and expansive communicative practices. Dad shared an appreciation for Brady’s ingenuity and flexibility, noting the ways in which Brady adapts his communicative strategies for the situation. He also described relying on Mom to interpret or mediate his communication with his son. In all, this study speaks to both researchers and educators who seek to a) better understand deaf adolescents’ heterogeneous communicative repertoires as dynamic, multimodal, and embodied, and b) design more inclusive and expansive literacy pedagogies.
Description
2026