Elina Tapio

Raami training & development services

In this paper we explore the use of multimodal and multilingual semiotic resources in interactions between two deaf signing participants, a researcher and an asylum seeker. The focus is on the use of gaze and environmentally coupled gestures. Drawing on multimodal analysis and linguistic ethnography, we demonstrate how gaze and environmentally coup...

This paper attends to languaging in the context of visually oriented communities of sign language users through the concept of chaining. I define chaining as the patterned, routine ways of interlinking different linguistic and multimodal elements. The goal of this paper is to discuss the concepts of chaining, languaging and remodalisation through p...

The paper reports the initial findings of the first phase of the research and development project PICCORE – Picture Communication in Reception Centres. The goal was to map the use of pictures and other visual modes of communication at reception centres in Finland using an ethnographic, multimodal research approach. The ethnographic data was collect...

Through detailed multimodal analyses, this article shows how participants of an English language course create and manage sites of attention for achieving collaboration across multiple spaces. The ethnographic data for the study comes from an English language course ‘Academic reading’ offered for university students majoring in Finnish Sign Languag...

Public discourse in the media about the future demands and requirements of working life on individuals often highlights the ever-increasing importance of interactional skills. Keeping in mind such common and generally-accepted observations, the aim of this study is to explore what might be the suggested points of departure for developing said inter...

(Accepted for publications 23/10/2018)

This paper focuses on how signing students organise themselves spatially in social interactions in a university lecture hall. One may view space as a concrete location, a social construct, and a normative actor with historical trajectories. The study addresses the question, 'What are the mediated actions through which the students and teacher (re)c...

A list of presentations and posters 2004 – 2016

Deaf sign language signers are often regarded as having limited resources with which to learn languages. Such a view can be identified as an authoritative discourse. However, recent empirical studies on communication-practices among signers do not support such a view. These studies show that abundant multilingual and multimodal resources exist for...

This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key ass...

The study focused on university students of English and their teachers appropriating an ecological perspective into language learning and teaching during a university course. The course involved designing and putting into practice an online language project for school children in Finland and Spain. The task was expected to pose challenges as the un...

When people draw on the available modal resources (e.g. gestures) in specific contexts over time, those resources come to display regularities. The more a community uses and regulates those resources, the more fully and finely articulated their regularities and patterns become. Modes, organised by regular means of representation, are constantly tra...

In the last 100 years attitudes towards deaf people and sign languages have changed drastically. During this time the deaf gradually became more visible in society: from the mid-eighteenth century an interest in sign languages began to develop, and in the middle of the nineteenth century education for the deaf began. In these early days deaf educat...