“Use Your Words”: A Conversation Analytic Perspective on Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Children’s Socialization into Oral Communication

Despite the centrality of socialization in the field of sociology, there is still much unknown about its basic processes and mechanisms. We do know that social interaction plays a crucial role in socializing children into competent members of their community, and that schools constitute a major site for socialization. For deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) children, their interaction and socialization experiences may be challenging because of potential communication barriers within their school setting. Yet, this issue has received little attention in existing research. This dissertation examines D/HH children’s social interactions in an oral preschool classroom, a special education setting specially designed for D/HH students to develop their spoken language and listening skills. My broad research question is: How are D/HH children socialized into oral communication? That is, in what ways are D/HH children socialized by their teachers and peers to ‘use their words’ in the production of social actions in interaction? What interactional practices do participants use to facilitate this? I rely on the method of Conversation Analysis (CA) to address these questions. Data consist of approximately 25 hours of video-recordings in one oral preschool classroom in Southern California. Chapter 2 analyzes the teachers’ use of other-initiated repair as a discursive practice for socializing the D/HH children into oral communication. Specifically, I examine how teachers problematize the acceptability of students’ non-vocal and/or minimally formatted (i.e., short) utterances, which consequently yields conversational preferences for vocalization and maximization in the oral classroom. Chapter 3 examines the teachers’ use of gesture — specifically, pointing to their mouth, pointing to their ear, and cupping their ear — as a non-verbal practice for socializing the D/HH children into spoken language and listening. I investigate how teachers deploy these gestures as part of their subsequent directives, after their prior directives are met with students’ non-compliance or displays of trouble. In other words, I explore how teachers use gestures during their pursuits, as well as how gestural directives function to socialize the D/HH children into oral communication. While Chapters 2 and 3 examine teachers’ practices for socializing the children into oral communication, Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the D/HH children socialize each other. I focus on how the children adapt to the culturally specific norms of their classroom, create and negotiate different interaction-participation opportunities amongst each other, and modify their communication according to their peer recipient. Taken together, the dissertation provides one of the few in-depth, interactional accounts of D/HH children’s socialization in an oral classroom, special-education setting. I show how socializing D/HH children into oral communication is not merely accomplished through classroom pedagogy and official curriculum, it is also through participants’ social interactions and routine activities that bring the oral classroom ‘into being,’ where certain meanings, norms, and expectations on the use of spoken language in everyday life are constructed, negotiated, and reproduced