Krister Schönström Docent

About me

I am an associate professor (reader) at the Department and subject leader for Sign language section.

I teach in the course Swedish Sign Language from a contrastive perspective on the Bachelor's Program in Sign Language and Interpreting. I also teach in various courses related to Swedish Sign Language and sign language linguistics. Additionally, I supervise students at both undergraduate and advanced levels, as well as doctoral candidates.

My research focuses on multilingualism in deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, with particular emphasis on language acquisition and use. I am especially interested in bimodal bilingualism involving both sign and spoken (written) languages, and in second-language (L2) acquisition of sign languages. I have authored several articles on L2 learning of sign language and led the RJ-funded project “From Speech to Sign: Learning Swedish Sign Language (STS) as a Second Language” (2017–2019), where I built a learner corpus of STS as an L2. I have also studied deaf migrants learning STS within a VR-funded project on the multilingual situation of deaf refugees.

As part of my work, I have developed several STS tests and assessments used to measure sign language proficiency across different user groups. I currently lead the Skolfi-funded project “Promoting the Reading of Deaf Students in Sign Language-Based Classrooms,” which investigates the role of sign language and fingerspelling in reading acquisition for deaf students. I am also involved in an RJ-funded study on the relationship between sign language abilities and aging.

I am a member of the Swe-CLARIN sign language team, contributing to the development of corpus-based research infrastructure for sign language data.


The multilingual situation of deaf refugees in Sweden (MULDER)

The project aims to generate knowledge about deaf adult refugees’ language situation. The integration of this group is strongly linked to their varied linguistic background, which is further complicated by the fact that many of these refugees are language delayed due to having had no or limited access to any language during childhood.

Språkbanken

Språkbanken is a national consortium that develops and distributes infrastructure for research that makes use of language data (speech, sign, text).