Communicating with children who are deaf: Pitfalls and possibilities

Adults vary in how far they control what is talked about in interactions with children who are deaf. The evidence discussed in this article involves teachers and students in classrooms, but the same principles apply to interactions between children and parents, speech clinicians, or other clinicians. We analyze teacher communication in terms of four dimensions: power repair, pace, and linguistic complexity. These features of teacher discourse are associated in that teachers who exert the most power (e.g., who ask frequent questions) also spend more time repairing students' communication and exhibit a relatively rapid turn rate in discourse. Their language also exhibits fewer complex grammatical features. Students in communication with these teachers produce shorter utterances, ask fewer questions offer less frequent contributions, communicate less often with peers, and show more signs of confusion and misunderstanding than they do with teachers who exert less power. We also discuss evidence that demonstrates that adults can change they way in which they manage conversations with children who are deaf in order to bring about more productive interactions. The implications of these findings for the development of linguistic competence in children who are deaf are explored.