Effective Deaf education requires teachers to be critical of their use of various communication modes in teaching. This study reports how an experienced teacher at a Deaf school in Japan self-reflected upon her teaching practices through the use of a classroom observation scheme BOLT (Bilingual Orientation in Language Teaching).
Many have argued for sign languages to be utitlised in the education of Deaf students (Grosjean, 2001; Padden & Ramsey, 2000; Strong& Prinz, 1997), but the vast majority of Deaf students in Japan are still educated through an oralist approach where teachers do not make use of Japanese Sign Language (JSL hereafter), despite it being a natural language and a powerful linguistic resource for teaching and learning (Kimura, 2011; Sasaki, 2013). Noting how an experienced teacher at a Deaf school employed translanguaging as her teaching strategy in the classroom, the researchers devised a classroom observation scheme to depict bilingual orientation in language teaching (BOLT). BOLT was inspired by two classroom observation schemes: COLT (Communicative Orientation in Language Teaching) proposed by Spada and Frölich (1995) and MOLT (Motivation Orientation in Language Teaching) proposed by Guilloteaux and Dörnyei (2008), and applies a similar technique in analysing classroom practices but with a focus on how teachers alter the use of their communication modes, in this case JSL, Signed Japanese, Spoken Japanese, Written Japanese, and finger spelling. It also codes teachers’ and students’ utterances according to their functions, such as scaffolding students in terms of the contents of the study, or giving linguistic scaffolding, and can thus present which communication modes are used for what purposes, making it easier for teachers to reflect upon their teaching practices. In this study, an experienced teacher is presented with BOLT analyses and self-reflects upon her teaching practices. Translanguaging in Deaf education requires a careful planning and the explicit intentions of teachers (Allard & Pichler, 2018; Swansick, 2017), because uncritical mixing of languages by teachers leads to an impoverished learning environment for linguistic minority students (Kano, 2016). The effectiveness of BOLT in assisting teachers to reflect on their practices will be discussed.
