Participation by hard-of-hearing students in integration classrooms: Facets of interactional competence

A growing number of deaf and hard-of-hearing students attend regular classrooms where they face specific opportunities and challenges concerning their participation. This book focuses on plurilingual (spoken and sign language) adolescents in partial integration, who are supported by a teaching assistant in the spoken language classrooms. How does the presence of an assistant shape the students' participation and the overall classroom interaction? How do the students design their engagement in classroom activities and how do they negotiate their hearing and understanding, which are particularly at risk for them? Managing these tasks calls for the participants' interactional competence, which is observed on the basis of their multimodal practices including verbal and non-verbal resources.

Simone Girard-Groeber is a scientific collaborator at the Institute for Integration and Participation at the FHNW School of Social Work in Olten (Switzerland). She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics, and her main research areas are interactional competence, multimodality, plurilingual interaction, and the participation of persons with communication disabilities.