For many oral deaf individuals, the most common methodologies for learning English as a foreign language pose challenges and do not meet their needs. In other words, a deaf person with the same reading and writing level as a hearing person may have lower speaking and listening skills when following traditional methodologies.

This is where the Talk Together project comes in: to offer English classes to deaf individuals focusing on improving their listening and speaking skills. The project is led by Amy Dara Hochberg, a researcher in the Network and collaborator with the GEDIT research group (which is part of the TraDiLex research group from the Network). Additionally, the project is being carried out in collaboration with ACAPPS, an affiliated entity of the Network.

The methodology, designed to make learning English more accessible for oral deaf individuals, is based on the researcher’s personal experiences ‘as a multilingual person with profound hearing loss.’ In summary, this approach uses ‘real-time captions, a video camera for the captioner to see the board (to reduce captioning errors), and a microphone that the teacher and students use so the captioner can transcribe their spoken words,’ explains the researcher.