Multilingual Interaction and Dementia

Edited by Charlotta Plejert, Camilla Lindholm, Dr. Robert W. Schrauf

Publication date:

12 April 2017

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781783097661

This book brings together international, linguistic research with a focus on interaction in multilingual encounters involving people with dementia in care and healthcare settings. The methodologies used (Conversation Analysis, Ethnography and Discursive Constructionism) capture practices on the micro-level, revealing how very subtle details may be of critical importance for the everyday well-being of participants with dementia, particularly in settings and contexts where there is a lack of a common verbal language of interlocutors, or where language abilities have been lost as a result of dementia. Chapters analyse the practices and actions employed by interlocutors to facilitate mutual understanding, enhance high-quality social relations and assure optimal care and treatment, in spite of language and cognitive difficulties, with an emphasis put on the participants’ remaining capacities, and what can be achieved between people with dementia and their interlocutors in a collaborative fashion. This book goes beyond the study of two-party communication to address multiparty and group interactions which are common in residential care and other healthcare settings and will be of interest to professionals and policy makers as well as to medical sciences and linguistics researchers and students.

Biographies

Acknowledgements

Sinfree Makoni: Preface

1. Charlotta Plejert, Camilla Lindholm and Robert W. Schrauf: Multilingual Interaction and Dementia

2. Camilla Lindholm: Aging as A Swedish-Speaking Finn: Positioning and Language Choice at a Nursing Home

3. Nicole Müller: ‘Fear Nó Bean, a Man or a Woman?’ Bilingual Encounters in Residential Eldercare in Ireland

4. Ali Reza Majlesi, Eleonor Antelius and Charlotta Plejert: Epistemic Negotiations in Interpreter-Mediated Dementia Evaluations: The Co-Operative Role of Patients’ Relatives

5. Gunilla Jansson and Cecilia Wadensjö: Creating Opportunities for Residents to Engage in Social Exchange: Brokering in Multilingual Residential Care Settings

6. Jeff Small, Sing Mei Chan, Elisabeth Drance, Judith Globerman, Lorraine Ho, Wendy Hulko, Deborah O'Connor, JoAnn Perry and Louise Stern: Verbal and Nonverbal Turn-Taking Actions of Care Staff and Residents in Linguistically Diverse Long-Term Care Settings

7. Maziar Yazdanpanah and Charlotta Plejert: Accommodation Practices in Multilingual Encounters in Swedish Residential Care

8. Robert W. Schrauf and Michael Amory: Training in Clinical Assessment: Proxying, Translating and Voice-Over as Discursive Devices

9. Boyd Davis and Margaret Maclagan: Challenges and Experiences in Training Multilingual, International Direct Care Workers in Dementia Care in the US

10. Charlotta Plejert, Camilla Lindholm and Robert W. Schrauf: Multilingual Interaction and Dementia. Future Directions for Research and Practice

This sparkling collection highlights the contribution of interactional research on dementia, revealing the complex interplay between the person with dementia and the people around them – staff, family and friends. The multilingual focus is a welcome acknowledgement that we live and conduct our affairs – in sickness and health – in a world of overlapping languages and cultures.