Deaf students face challenges and barriers in US general education classrooms due to barriers of non-matched monolingual instruction. The demographics of deaf education classrooms have changed over the years and no longer are families encouraged to choose one modality. Multilingual DHH students face unique challenges and barriers that cannot be left unaddressed or overlooked. The following chapter outlines a literature review of the guiding principles of UDL specifically to address the challenges and needs of multilingual DHH. This chapter addresses the need for the three guiding principles, engagement, representation, and expression, along with the integration of technology. Practical application will guide current deaf educators in creating lessons and physical classrooms while implementing technology to meet deaf students' needs in general education classrooms.
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Historically, DHH students and their families have been persuaded by the medical and educational fields to pick one language and one modality over multilingualism and multimodality. However, deaf education philosophies continue to evolve and displayed in classrooms. The first bilingual programs for DHH students originated in the early 1980s in Sweden, which featured dual modality, spoken English and ASL, and dual culture, deaf and hearing cultures (Mayer & Leigh, 2010). Following Sweden’s example, similarly modeled bilingual programs were started in the United States, with the belief that DHH students would have access to academic content in a manual mobility, such as American Sign Language (ASL), and develop literacy in another language, such as written English, without being exposed to the spoken form of language.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice along with the U.S. Department of Education (n.d.), it is within the school’s legal responsibility to provide accessible materials with important school information to families in their language. However, educators of DHH students, in every learning environment and academic placement, have struggled with helping students make connections to the curriculum in two or more languages, just as typical hearing peers who are English language learners (ELL) struggle to make connections between the language used at home and the language used in the classroom. Beyond making these connections, DHH students also struggle to understand what they are learning in a visual modality as it relates to the primary language being used to present the content. The need for alignment is critical for the growing number of DHH students to then be able to connect the information to their first language or the language that is used at home (Rao & Torres, 2016). To date, there is limited research on the population of students who are DHH and multilingual; however, a synthesis of related theory, research, and practice on spoken languages of multilinguals can be used to promote research in this area (Pizzo, 2016). Specifically, Pizzo (2016) noted three focal points, which include: 1) population characteristics; 2) theories for understanding multilingual students’ language development process; and 3) considerations for curriculum, program, and service development and implementation.