Jenny Webster

Jenny’s research areas are sign language endangerment, sign multilingualism, and deaf literacy. She has been working at UCLan since 2001, and joined iSLanDS in 2007. In 2021 she began supporting bid writing, research activities and publications for the wider School. In addition to her research roles, Jenny provides English language support to deaf students and academics, and edits publications for international organisations including the European Union of the Deaf, the International Telecommunication Union, and UNESCO.

Jenny has published papers on sign language vitality, multilingual behaviour in sign language users, and deaf literacy and multiliteracies. She co-edited the books Sign Multilingualism and READ WRITE EASY: Research, practice and innovation in multiliteracies (Volumes 1 and 2), with Ulrike Zeshan.

Jenny studied journalism at UCLan (BA, 2003) and English at Lancaster University (MA with distinction, 2007), and then returned to UCLan to study British Sign Language / English interpreting and translation (Postgraduate Diploma, 2015). She has written three journal articles on scoring the vitality of sign languages (Webster & Safar, 2019, 2020; Webster, 2021), and co-authored chapters in Sign Multilingualism (De Gruyter, 2020) and both volumes of READ WRITE EASY (Ishara Press, 2021).

In the areas of deaf literacy and multiliteracies, she worked with deaf peer tutors based in India and Uganda to produce resource materials including best practice examples and a handbook for deaf language and literacy trainers, and she researched the changing role of language support tutors working with deaf university students in the UK (Webster, Snell, Barnes & Caudrelier, 2022).

Qualifications

Areas of interest and expertise