2nd International Conference on Teaching Deaf Learners

The 2nd International Conference on Teaching Deaf Learners brings together international presenters from several continents to share perspectives on many aspect of deaf education and deaf learners. Presentations are given solely by invitees, all authoritative experts in their own fields, on topics encompassing language, cognitive, and social development, literacy and numeracy skills, and the changing landscape of educating deaf learners. 

Conference organisers Professor Marc Marschark and Professor Harry Knoors

I was invited to give a plenary presentation describing "Deaf and Hard of Hearing multilingual learners: Language acquisition in a multilingual world". Here is the abstract.

The growing linguistic diversity of D/deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners creates a challenge for educators and clinicians who work with these children and their families. With over 7,000 language spoken in the world and increasing levels of transnational mobility, the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of DHH learners accessing education and therapy services has never been greater. Within this paper, current perspectives on spoken language multilingualism will be described and related to DHH multilingual learners and their families, and the educators and clinicians who work with them. Parental and professional perspectives on choices about language use and multilingualism for DHH children will be described, along with research describing the speech and language outcomes for DHH children living and learning in multilingual environments. The need for interdisciplinary collaboration for supporting, assessing, and monitoring the speech and language development of DHH multilingual learners will be discussed.

Sessions were presented by many leaders in the field of deaf education including Dr Jessica Trussell from the Center for Education Research Partnerships at RIT whose paper was titled "Decoding interventions for secondary readers"

Dr Jessica Trussell of CERP

Also attending was fellow Fulbright scholar from The Netherlands Lian van Berkel who presented a paper titled "On the role of augmentative signs in spoken word learning in deaf children".

This was an amazing conference and an opportunity to catch up with old friends from around the world and to make many new friends.

Dr Jessica Trussell, Kate, and Dr Jennifer Beal-Alvarez

 Kate and Trudy Smith