Building L2 social connections: the case of learners of Auslan (Australian Sign Language)

ABSTRACT

Social interaction, and the attendant negotiation of meaning, is of prime importance for developing second language (L2) skills. Yet how learners go about building L2 social networks – and why some have more success than others in doing so – remains underexplored. This article explores this phenomenon via a 12-month longitudinal case study of three hearing adult learners of Auslan (Australian Sign Language) who were studying the language in a vocational education setting. Drawing on language diaries and stimulated recall interviews, we explore the learner’s contact with deaf signers and use of Auslan with hearing peers, as well as the factors shaping this involvement and how it changed as their language proficiency developed. While one of our learners threw herself into volunteering and emerged from the study with strong L2 social networks, the other two struggled to varying degrees to build networks and balance the demands of paid work and L2 study. Socio-economic factors played an important role in shaping our student’s engagement and investment in L2 learning. From this, we argue that tertiary L2 programs may be subtly reproducing privilege, and need to address this if we are serious about increasing minority representation in L2 programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Sign language teaching
• social networks
• second language learning

Acknowledgements

We are also thankful for the comments of the two anonymous reviewers who gave generously of their time and helped us greatly in expanding our thinking within the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note the assumption in this quote that sign L2 learners are by definition hearing people.

2 As Valentine and Skelton (2008) outline, this decline has been precipitated in part by the rise of video-based communications technology like FaceTime and Zoom that let deaf people communicate in real time without being physically co-present, as well as by social networking technologies that make it easier for like-minded deaf people to find each other and arrange their own private events.

3 All names are pseudonyms.

4 This research was approved by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee, under project number 6671. For more details of the methodology of the wider study see Willoughby and Sell (in press).

5 A copy of the diary template and stimulated recall interview questions is available for download at https://doi.org/10.26180/19100309.v1.

6 As he was highly educated and had professional employment, he had access to capital that participants like Rob lacked. We are thus loath to attribute his learning success solely to his hearing status.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council to complete this research, as well as the input of the wider project team: Adam Schembri and Cathy Clark for assistance with methodology design and Joe Sabolcec and Ramas McRea for facilitating participant recruitment. We are indebted to Melbourne Polytechnic and Expression Australia for their institutional support of this project.

Notes on contributors

Louisa Willoughby

A/Prof Louisa Willoughby works at the interface of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics to explore how multlicultural societies responds to linguistic diversity. Much of her work explores the teaching and learning of so-called ‘small' languages, including heritage languages and sign languages.

Cathy Sell

Dr Cathy Sell is a researcher working in the fields of Linguistics and Translation Studies, and a Japanese-English translator specialising in fine arts and popular culture. Her primary research interests relate to multimodal communication, including semiotics in art museums, manga as an intercultural medium, and second language acquisition of sign language.