Language Landscapes
Build a language demographic of your school or service
Use this section to gather information about the language landscape of your school or service. Some of this information may already be available to you through the Census, Local Authority, CRIDE or your SEF data. Prompt questions in this section will help you gather this data to provide a linguistic context for your language planning work.
To develop language planning at an individual level requires some understanding of the language landscape of the learning context, which encompasses homes, communities, cultures and schools. This knowledge will inform the provision of learning support, assessment and education services to all deaf children and their families in an increasingly multilingual United Kingdom where the proportion and relative commonness of languages continues to change in response to growing super-diversity and migration patterns.
Prompt questions to build a language demographic of your school/service:
What do you know about the population of your local authority?
- Size
- Diversity (language and ethnicity)
What do you know about your school/service population?
- Number on roll
- Distribution across pre-school, primary and secondary
What do you know about the ‘language landscape’ of your school/service population?
- Spoken languages in use
- Sign languages in use
- Patterns of language use and/ commentary on the language data such as examples of how families use their languages.
- Staff language skills, training and qualifications (sign and spoken)
Where is this information currently available?
- Council census date
- CRIDE data (2013)
- SEF data (for schools)
- Gaps in this data
Examples of demographic case studies from services in the UK and from research internationally can be found in Appendix 1.