Language - English - Difficult / Question You - Think - What?

The present study concerns the reading and writing performance of Deaf learners in EFL(English as a Foreign Language). The learners’ mother tongue is LIS and their culture is the Italian Deaf Culture; however, when it comes to reading and writing, the same language (that is, written Italian) is shared by Deaf users of LIS, deaf lip-readers and hearing Italians. The paper is based on experimental EFL teaching/learning with adult students featuring the above linguistic/cultural traits. Its aim is to analyze classroom interaction: first, conversational strategies in the pluricultural/plurilingual cross-modal classroom (LIS-Italian-English) are discussed; next, selected excerpts from ethnographic records are analyzed for “local” microtextual strategies within single turns. Here, analysis focuses on verbal transcription of short segments involving all or some of the following: the teacher’s input, the interpreter’s rendering into LIS or Italian of the teacher’s or students’ contributions and the response of the class.