Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describe the current routine services offered to families of deaf children, as well as emphasising a drive towards family-centred interventions and an understanding of the importance of the family dynamic for the child's development. Interventions delivered to families of deaf children included Early Childhood Home Instruction, Auditory Verbal Therapy and the Webster-Stratton programme. It examines the pragmatic tagging process to assess how the participants' involvement at the level of critical discourse impacted on the potential for transformative learning. Reporting two case studies, the book demonstrates how the concept of empowerment and the corpus-driven methodology for examining language data have broader applications. In the context of online journalism, the concept of deliberative discussion is comparable to the concept of 'empowerment' as it is defined in this work, as well as the collaborative principles explored in the work from the intensive care unit (ICU).