The patterned ways of interlinking linguistic and multimodal elements in visually oriented communities

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 practical examples. The material for the paper comes from two ethnographic research projects which examine the use of multiple signed and spoken languages via different modalities in educational contexts. Both projects take a point of departure in ethnography and multimodal approaches towards interaction stemming from mediated discourse analysis. By examining the multimodal and multilingual practices, this paper aims at providing teachers and language learners with tools with which to reflect upon complex and often unnoticed resources used in everyday interaction.