Multilingualism, Identity and Belonging: Experiences of a Deaf, Signing Arabic-English Multilingual
Madawi Alahmad and Sabine Little
The University of Sheffield offers Undergraduate Students the opportunity to apply for research funding, as part of the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience. Each year, second year undergraduate students are able to develop a research project in collaboration with a member of staff. The collaboration is mutually beneficial — the students have the opportunity to benefit from the staff member’s research experience, and staff have the chance to work with interested students. Our collaboration began when Madawi contacted Sabine to suggest a proposal on multilingual, deaf, signing, Arabic and English speakers, wanting to explore how multilingualism, identity and belonging manifest themselves when multiple signed and spoken languages are part of an individual’s world. The very specific “niche” was perceived to be a potential issue to recruitment from the start, and so we developed a narrative research proposal that would lend itself to rich data collection from small numbers of participants. Sabine’s previous work on emotional and practical links to language made similar use of narratives, which Madawi extended to include questions about sign language practices.
The study found that being a multilingual deaf individual greatly influences the individual’s socialization process with their close and extended family; with their school peers and teachers; and the general community. Additionally, the attempts at support were found to help in aiding the individual’s socialization, nevertheless, such support, especially with language acquisition, was found to be unequally distributed amongst the multiple languages providing a gap in which future support agents can aim to provide a more well-rounded support for multilinguals. Throughout the study, various remarks were made to the influence multilingualism has on an individual’s confidence and identity in addition to how a sense of belonging develops when an individual can communicate with the community. A video was created to share the findings of the study by providing abstracts of the narrative and the themes that emerge in an attempt to invite further research with deaf multilinguals and shed the light on a type of multilingualism that is overlooked in academia.
Madawi Alahmad is a third year student on BA Education, Culture and Childhood and Dr Sabine Little is a lecturer in The School of Education.
