Rethinking Accessibility through ADAT: Challenging the Taboo of Deafness in Foreign Language Education

Abstract

A persistent fear of the ‘diverse’, combined with scarce intercultural awareness, has long reinforced entrenched socio-cultural taboos that have impacted the social and cognitive development of marginalized, non-mainstream communities, such as the Deaf. This tension has been at the core of a fierce debate over the supposed supremacy of the oral method as opposed to manualism (Hutchison 2007), with major implications for minoritized deaf learners. In light of the latest technological innovations and the growing emphasis on inclusive teaching methods, this article aims to propose the application of Accessible Didactic Audiovisual Translation (ADAT) and – more specifically – of DIDAT (Deaf-Inclusive DAT) for teaching English in a mixed classroom environment with a focus on written comprehension and production. An experimental lesson plan based on didactic keyword captioning is proposed to introduce learners to subtitling, followed by the preliminary results from the submissions of 20 DHH and hearing B1-level students at an Italian university.