Multimodal Transduction and Translanguaging in Deaf Pedagogy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article presents a fresh perspective and a new angle regarding teaching deaf children who are multilingual and multimodal. 

The author(s) clearly show(s) good theoretical understanding of different concepts, such as multimodal transduction, translanguage, languaging, and such. Because of that, they were able to describe and demonstrate the distinction of concepts used in the paper well.  

Could some of the sentences be improved in that they are written in third person? 

Would a brief summary on historical context of deaf pedagogy in the introduction offer/add the significance of your study? 

Could the table 2 be improved by converting the table into columns, showing each modal logics next to one another?  

Overall, I enjoyed reading/reviewing the article and appreciated the thoughtfulness and emphasis on creating connections between mental representation/concept, present moment, and meaning, and teaching/learning can't and should not be limited by language through MT. 

Thank you. 

Author Response

I appreciate this reviewer's focus on issues of equity and critical stances. I have updated to manuscript to highlight these issues and make their linkages stronger across sections. I have also chosen to explicate how language and translanguaging relate to MT in much more clear ways, mainly by revising the structure of the analysis. 

Reviewer 2 Report

It is a good paper that describes well the Multimodal Transduction (MT) teaching method and places it well in the semiotic orientation, which takes into account not only the linguistic dimension but also the discursive point of view, in line with the studies of Kress (2010). The author states that his/her aim is also to relate this pedagogical method to deaf education, based on the observation of how a group of deaf teachers uses this method to promote critical thinking among their deaf students.

From the perspective of bilingual and multilingual methodology related to deaf education, the author refers to the following traditional techniques: languaging, translanguaging, codeswitching and chaining. He/she considers them to be limited. However, those have been and still are linguistic resources with a very clear purpose, used in deaf education. On the one hand, a linguistic goal - developing and promoting bilingualism and multilingualism among deaf pupils. On the other hand, there is an ethical objective - equating deaf education to that of hearing people without discrimination. Therefore, the mentioned goals are part of a clear pedagogical objective that put sign languages on an equal footing with oral languages and made it clear that there is no difference between deaf and hearing education.

This is a very important aspect of the article I am evaluating that has not been developed; I consider it negative and I would suggest improving it. It seems that the author's aim is only to show that the MT method is good in itself and then it can be applied to any aspect of deaf education, even to different situations in higher education, language deprivation, deaf students with sensory disabilities, etc. The author would need to place this method in the context of a more critical view of deaf education and show how MT can also contribute to the equity of deaf and hearing education. He/she could even compare how this pedagogical method has been used in hearing education and then indicate better the benefits of deaf education. I think it is important to highlight that the ultimate goal is to achieve deaf education without discrimination using the most creative linguistic and discursive methods.

Author Response

I appreciate this reviewer's comments on the depth of theorizing, I have retained this focus in my second draft but have increased the clarity and focus and concision of my article to make it more direct. I also updated sentences to use first person throughout, added historical context, revised the table 2 (great suggestion to use side-by-side columns!). 

Reviewer 3 Report

I found this article thought provoking and interesting. It is a piece that has the potential to clarify the theory and practice of deaf pedagogy, but it is currently very hard to follow and to identify the main ideas and theoretical contribution.

The style is excitable and lively and although we need this energy the rigour and significance are currently rather lost in a narrative style that frequently diverts from the thread of the argument. I think that this can be addressed. Some more careful theorising and structural tidying could make this a publishable piece.  

The main theoretical contribution centres on MT and this needs work. It would be useful to see MT described as a process rather than a tool - ‘such as in MT is used’ or ‘what is it good for’. Instead, I understand this to be another way of analysing multilingual and multimodal communication.  The question I have is therefore what this way of looking adds to language-led analysis processes, and/or multimodal analysis processes that are both already so well established and sophisticated methods. I would want to be convinced that this is not simply another neologism like ‘translanguaging’ that (in some writing) has little theoretical depth.

To address this could the abstract and the introduction make it clear that you are looking at an analysis framework and could the introduction spell out what you see as the new potential of MT, the theoretical basis of MT and how this relates to other processes, and then finally what your specific research questions are for this paper.  Once you have your questions or your thesis stated upfront could you use these as a framework for the following sections?

For example section 2 -  can you make it clear that the paper reports on some empirical work that relates to your RQs and could you describe your methodology more systematically? I understand that there is a lot going on here, but I don’t really see what you were looking for.

For section 3 and 4, the results need to refer to some questioning framework. What did you want to know/prove/show? And how did you get form your method to your results? Would you be able to show some of the MT analysis process and perhaps your coding framework?  The case studies could then become more of a coherent par of the piece if each of them could illuminate something from this process. If instead you are suing the empirical work to design an MT analysis framework, then this needs to be explained and you can talk about the grounded nature of the work. Now you have lots of great idea and observations but little structure and so it is hard to see the main contribution of the study. I wondered what it would look like to take the cases out and have a theoretical piece with some examples from your observations - it might not be enough, but the material somehow needs streamlining against your thesis and this was a suggestion.

The discussion begins to set out the thesis and the contribution more clearly and I think you could  use this structure to set up the beginning of the paper.

I really admire what you are trying to do - few scholars are keen to get into the communication messiness of the classroom and so all the new terms become stranded in ideology. This piece potentially illuminates the layered communication processes of the ‘deaf education’ classroom and thus expands and challenges traditional multimodal analysis processes. However, if we want to show the realities of deaf pedagogy the writing needs to be a bit crisper and more organised around these established knowledge frameworks.

Author Response

I appreciate this reviewer's clear, deep arguments about my meandering writing. I have completely rewritten the text and removed many redundancies, and have trimmed out paths-to-nowhere digressions. Structural cleaning was needed, I agree, and the new product is more lean and fearsome. Methodology, also, is more robustly described and, chiefly, I explore the /why/ of this article using both data and theory (it is a grounded theory after all!). I appreciate the comments on my urgency, too. 

Reviewer 4 Report

This article focuses on multimodal transduction (MT) in deaf education. The author means that MT is an overarching concept for what is going on in deaf classrooms, including not only language and communication, but also multimodality. According to the author, MT is “a process of ethical pedagogic change via aesthetic forms”. In this paper, the author, therefore, aims to “explore a theoretical account of MT alongside qualitative evidence, which is analyzed, interpreted, and contextualized against deaf research corpora, including an overt focus on translanguaging”. In this description, the largest problem appears: the paper does, in fact, not have a particular focus on translanguaging.

Although the theorizing and discussion about MT and what it means and include are interesting per se, the topic for the special issue is translanguaging. The paper title and abstract mention translanguaging, and the reader get the impression that the text will focus on both MT and translanguaging, but this is not the case. The author starts by stating that translanguaging is a sub-category of MT and that translanguaging “is one variety of MT that emphasizes changes between language modes”. The author does not explain how he/she understands translanguaging, what the meaning of translanguaging is in this study, how this study contributes to the translanguaging theory or pedagogy, etc. Instead, the author lists several theories and methods, such as code-switching, chaining, and languaging, and places translanguaging on par with these. Translanguaging, thus, does not have a particular place in the article.

The author begins by telling that the article summarizes components of a larger research project. No research questions or the study’s aim are given. It makes it hard to understand what the article in reality is about.

I think the article will benefit from a more specific focus on just how translanguaging can be understood in relation to MT. In its current form, the manuscript is very long, wordily, and sprawling, including so many different ideas and concepts, with content that better should be divided into two different articles. The text has two result sections and four discussion sections, and many new ideas and descriptions appear in the discussion section, making the text hard to read and understand. It seems as the author both want to write an empirical and a theoretical paper simultaneously and it becomes too much.

Against this summary, I suggest that the author consider revising the manuscript extensively to fit this special issue or before submitting it to another journal/issue. In the following, I will provide some comments on the different sections of the article that may help in revision work, although my main points are those mentioned above.

Introduction

The description here is interesting and gives a good conception of MT and what it is. I would, however, not reduce translanguaging to a theory/pedagogy that emphasizes changes between language modes. Translanguaging is more than that and does not require a change of modes at all (for example, when using two different sign languages in the interaction).

Please, add here clear research questions for the present study, not just what you already have found in the larger project.

Materials and Methods: A Theoretical and Methodological Framework

The title on the heading is confusing. You may divide theory and method into different sections, or, because you already have described MT in the introduction, add some theory there, and here focus on the material and methods.

You describe the participants’ characteristics well, but the explanation of the method is diffuse. It is hard to understand how and what you have done. You provide descriptions that require more previous knowledge to understand, for example, when you write (lines 90-98):

“My study was multimethod in design (Easterbrooks, 2017). I used qualitative case study data to ground, explain, and clarify theoretical claims. Principally, I used established case-study methods and practices (Enns, 2017; Stake, 1995; 2005) juxtaposed alongside grounded theory concepts (Charmaz, 2014), as a means to synthesize explanatory theories using observational data (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) about the forms and functions of visual and multimodal pedagogy in deaf higher education contexts. Through my research, empirical demonstrations of theoretical ideas, which prior research (Kusters, et al., 2017) lacked, were interpreted through a conceptual framework about dissensus and conflict (Rancière, 2010) in deaf pedagogic contexts (Kress, 2010; Vygotsky, 1993).”

For a reader unfamiliar with the references, some of these sentences are impossible to interpret in relation to what you have done. I suggest you re-write the method section to clearly explain your present study with explicit descriptions of what you have done and how.

One more example; you tell that you have used four data collection methods, and in the fourth, you write (line 107-110): 4) stimulated recall (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña. 2020; Phillips & Carr, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Category four was comprised of elicitation tasks where participants and I co-analyzed selections of data using new queries (e.g., items 1 and 3)” – what is items 1 and 3??

Results

As I mentioned above, you have two result sections, and I would suggest you focus on the result 2 section. The deaf teachers’ strategies are interesting, and there, you have many possibilities to take another point of view and connect MT with translanguaging.

Result 2 has some quite confusing sub-titles when you use “R2a” etc. I would suggest you highlight the method/strategy they use in the heading, making it easier for the reader to understand what the section wants to illustrate.

Some illustrations seem to be simple. Consider changing them (and the Diagram in Illustration 1 is mentioned as “in progress”) to more explicit and clean ones.

The results are given large space and you tell many things in detail, including both examples from data and your own interpretation and explanations of how the cases can be understood. Consider shortening the text and examples and giving them a more concrete and explicit form. Also consider that the reader may not understand your transcription/presentation, for example, the [box] [box] >> [box] in R2c.

Discussion

Also here, you have several discussion sections (four), meaning that the discussion in total becomes very long. Here, you also add new ideas and concepts that are not mentioned previously. It makes the text different from the usual article structure. The paper looks more like a book with chapters, rather than a research article. The content is interesting, but there are too many different directions and it becomes unclear what the main points are. And, because the special issue focuses on translanguaging, you should discuss this topic here – also if you suggest translanguaging being a sub-group of MT, your discussion could lead the reader to this point here.

Conclusion

Here, it would be great just sum up your results, helping the reader to see the most important points you have mentioned and the main findings.

Author Response

This reviewer offered many good comments, so many so that the system cut them off following the word "Conclusion," however, I was able to make many, many changes to address these issues. Chief among them was to make the relationships between MT and translanguaging more apparent and forceful. I also appreciate and have rectified the comment about a lack of research questions. I have addressed many issues by retitling sections, and by being more stringent about what was retained (and deleting a lot along the way) that was extraneous or meandering, in particular, the discussion sections, and the data sections are revised to be more clear and persuasive and less cluttered. 

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I am satisfied that the authors have improved this paper sufficiently.

Author Response

No changes were needed by this reviewer.

Reviewer 4 Report

I am glad to see the large improvement in the article. Several of my primary doubts and comments have been solved. For example, it is now very much clearer how the article fits into a special issue on translanguaging. The relation between MT and translanguaging is much clearer and the red tread and article structure are much better and more explicitly focused on the concept of MT and the results. I found a few typos/errors in the language, such as in row 69 ("s" for is) and 676 (it's for it is) and some more. I would recommend reading the manuscript throughout in order to correct such language errors.

One thing I still do not manage to understand is the examples "e.g., [box] [box] [box]" in the third case analysis. I read the text and the explanations, etc. but I do not understand just these "e.g."'s with "boxes". It may be just me that does not understand, but for me, it looks like an Appendix or something is missing... You wrote (in line 600) "[See Box inset for relative positions and changes shown in orange)." (note the different brackets). I cannot find Box insets and orange color...? You may explain this a little more or add a footnote explaining the is. 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, and suggestions. I think one of the issues is that the formatting may be lost on "your" end, but it IS included in the file I submitted (e.g., the [box] conventions). I'll add another sentence to clarify. 

I also did another read through for minor errors and fixed those that I found.