Language Campus Seminar 2024: Linguistic Justice and Participation

Carter Churchill v. Newfoundland and Labrador English School District is a test case for the standard of education provided to deaf learners in Canada who benefit from sign language. This paper analyzes legal documents related to this case as they illuminate current understanding of linguistic justice and relational ethics. Carter is a deaf child with cerebral palsy whose parents filed a human rights complaint alleging that he experienced discrimination on the basis of disability in the delivery of educational services. This was due to the failure of educational authorities to accommodate Carter’s sign language needs and access to an education equal in quality to that of nondeaf children in an environment free from social isolation. On March 1, 2023 the Human Rights Commission of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Board of Inquiry decision was released that found the school district failed to provide reasonable accommodation and discriminated against Carter during the first four years of his education. However, this decision and related events stop short of ordering linguistic justice for deaf children in the form of sign language policy and planning that fulfills a society’s ethical responsibilities to deaf people. 

Kristin Snoddon is an Associate Professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University. Her current research focuses on sign language ideologies and ideologies of understanding. She is lead editor of the book Critical Perspectives on Plurilingualism in Deaf Education (2021). 

Linguistic justice and inclusion often start from the idea that everyone should be able to use the languages they know in different situations, and all languages are equal. This, of course, goes without saying. Another angle to this topic is to consider the right and opportunities to study and learn languages in which to participate and be included. Finnish comprehensive school’s basic principle is that everyone, regardless of their background, is offered the same opportunities for basic education  - including  broadening one’s linguistic repertoire.  

In my presentation I will focus on what language competence means for inclusion and participation in society, and how opportunities to build language skills are realised. I will also ponder on how to better provide and guarantee opportunities for acquiring and learning languages and through that, for creating a more democratic and inclusive society.  

Katja Mäntylä is senior lecturer of English at the Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä. Her research focuses on foreign language learning and teaching from learner and teacher perspective as well as its structures. 

In my keynote talk, I will address the linguistic vulnerability and participation of marginalised people, such as people with disabilities and asylum seekers, during the asylum process. In my dissertation research, I have examined the experiences of deaf asylum seekers in the Finnish asylum process and multimodal interaction, as well as the transformation of their language beliefs during the asylum process. My ethnographic research was based on a sociolinguistic perspective on multilingualism and language beliefs. The findings show that communication is challenging in the absence of a shared fluent language: if there is no shared fluent language, the risk of misunderstanding is high.  Deaf asylum seekers' language proficiency in the signed languages varied widely. Multimodal strategies are used as one of the tools to build a common understanding. Moreover, the deaf people's experience of language and their  language belief may not correspond to the authorities' conceptualisation of named languages. The concepts of language and mother tongue were unfamiliar to the participants in my study. Instead, language is experienced as a concrete event and an interactive phenomenon. In my presentation, I also discuss the linguistic rights of deaf asylum seekers during the Finnish asylum process. 

Nina Sivunen is a senior lecturer of Finnish Sign Language at Diakonia University of Applied Sciences. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics in early December 2023. 

Program version 22 April 2024

Session abstracts version 17 April 2024

Menu of the social dinner

Submission of abstracts began on 12 January 2024

Submission of abstracts ended on 31 January 2024

Program published by 11 March 2024

Registration to the event begins on 11 March 2024

Registration to the event ends on 16 April 2024 

Tamás Péter Szabó, Department of Teacher Education, co-chair

Petteri Laihonen, Centre for Applied Language Studies, co-chair

Emilia Rajala, Centre for Applied Language Studies, secretary

Maija Lappalainen, Centre for Applied Language Studies

Dmitri Leontjev, Centre for Applied Language Studies

Terhi Paakkinen, Department of Language and Communication Studies

Ulla Sivunen, Department of Teacher Education

Sabine Ylönen, Centre for Applied Language Studies