Sign bilingualism in Spanish deaf education

This chapter is part of a larger research project that approaches the study of the sociolinguistic and socio-discursive changes that have taken place over the last decade in the Spanish Deaf community in the light of contact with the wider European and worldwide deaf movement. In the research presented in this chapter, the aim has been to observe these changes from an institutional perspective: (1) an analysis of the changes that have taken place in certain education centres, where oralist teaching methods have been replaced by bilingual methods and the reactions of the education authorities to such changes; and (2) an ideological analysis of political discourse on deafness by politicians and the latest publications of experts in deaf education.