Multimodal communication is the educational approach that Le Farfalle Cooperative offers to hearing children and adolescents with severe communicative disabilities. It is not a single method but a methodology that draws on many tools: Italian in all its forms (spoken, written, signed), Italian Sign Language (LIS), symbols, and images.
When a child shows the desire to communicate but struggles to express himself through speech, LIS offers an alternative language that can meet his communicative needs, at least for the moment, without closing the door to learning and speaking Italian in the future.
The first attempts in Rome date to 1996. Before that, some educators had committed themselves to offering a bilingual educational approach to deaf children, believing it right and respectful to give them the chance to acquire their natural language spontaneously.
"Every deaf child, regardless of the degree of hearing loss, should have the right to grow up bilingual. By learning and using sign language alongside spoken language—in its written form and, where possible, in its spoken form—the child can fully develop his cognitive, linguistic, and social abilities." (François Grosjean)
Drawing on what we had learned from bilingual education for deaf children, we taught hearing children with severe communicative disabilities to let their hands speak.
At first, we thought only of offering an alternative language, given how difficult it was for some children and adolescents to articulate the sounds and words of Italian.
But then we realized that LIS could also help them understand Italian better.
The hearing children we worked with often had other challenges too: epilepsy, dyspraxia, cognitive delays, and behaviors that didn't serve them—problems that often came down to a lack of communication.
These children, precisely because of cognitive delays, struggle to decode spoken language. But they understand the message more easily when it is expressed in sign language, which, because of how it is structured—so different from Italian—lets them see what is being communicated.
Dr. Luisa Gibellini, 2018