What is your current job title and current role?
Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist (Hearing Impairment and Deafness)
My role is the clinical lead for babies, children and young people with hearing impairment and deafness. I work across Oldham and Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale providing specialist assessment and treatment for patients with permanent hearing loss. I plan, deliver, and evaluate services for this population for working jointly with partners in health and education.
Who are your Pre-doc supervisors?
Dr Paul Conroy
Senior Clinical Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy
The University of Manchester
Dr Janine Owens
Research Fellow, ARC-GM mental health theme
The University of Manchester
Additional Advisors include
Bilingualism: Dr Sean Pert
Senior Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy
The University of Manchester
Deafness: Dr Suzi Willis
Senior Clinical Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy
Manchester Metropolitan University
What is your field of research?
Communication outcomes for deaf multilingual children. Specifically deaf children from families who use more than one spoken language.
Why are you interested in research and this ARC Pre-doctoral fellowship?
I have been practising as a Speech and Language Therapist specialising in deafness for the last ten years. I had begun to recognise that the families that I worked with from Pakistani and Bengali communities were not reflected in the research literature. I was interested in understanding the experiences of deaf multilingual children and their families.
To understand the beliefs and values that influence the development of communication, wellbeing and family connectedness and how I could develop my clinical practice and improve patient centred care. On a professional level, the ARC Pre-doctoral fellowship provided the opportunity to develop new skills and knowledge. I wanted to develop my career in a way that would enhance my clinical practice. I am in the early stages of my research career and the ARC Pre-doctoral fellowship has provides the supportive environment so that I can develop my research skill alongside my clinical practice.
Research question
What are the experiences of families and deaf multilingual children when developing language?
In what ways does the use of different languages promote and facilitate psychosocial and functional outcomes for deaf multilingual pre-school children?
Research summary
The research to be developed will comprise of two studies:
Study one: A systematic review of the literature related to deaf multilingual children language use and language outcomes.
Study two: An ethnographic study that seeks to explore the experiences of deaf multilingual children and their families. Embedded within the observations will be a study of language use within the families of deaf multilingual children.
Participants will be the families of deaf multilingual children aged 3-5 years from Pakistani and Bengali communities living in England. It will involve participant observation through fieldwork and interviews with deaf multilingual children and their families.
The study will produce a rich, thick description of patterns of behaviours, beliefs, and values for deaf multilingual children and their families (Richards & Morse, 2012). By using themes from the literature relating to Family Language Policy (Spolksy, 2012), Parental Impact Belief, (De Houwer, 1999) and Group Socialization Theory (Harris, 1995) as a framework for analysis, the data generated will illustrate how deaf multilingual children and their families create meaning within their communities.
This project will produce new knowledge about the experiences of deaf multilingual children and their families. There is currently no research of this kind relating specifically to the Pakistani and Bengali communities living in England.
The knowledge produced in this study will be used to audit current clinical practice for deaf multilingual children from Pakistani and Bengali communities living in England. This will lead to changes in practices that improve patient-centeredness and outcomes for deaf multilingual children. Specifically, enhancing guidance for parents of deaf multilingual children to facilitate multilingual language development and clinical guidance on language use during language interactions in the home and in therapeutic instruction.
What research training courses/modules are you accessing as part of your Fellowship?
Research Design Course Unit: part of the master’s in clinical research at The University of Manchester
Introduction to Ethnographic Research Methods: The University of Aberdeen.