Innovative Practices for Teaching Sign Language Interpreters

Researchers now understand interpreting as an active process between two languages and cultures, with social interaction, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis as more appropriate theoretical frameworks. Roy's penetrating new book acts upon these new insights by presenting six dynamic teaching practices to help interpreters achieve the highest level of skill. Elizabeth Winston and Christine Monikowski begin by explaining discourse mapping to enable students to develop a mental picture of a message's meaning and the relationships of context, form, and content. Kyra Pollitt discusses critical discourse analysis, to reveal some of the cultural influences that shape a speaker's language use. Melanie Metzger describes preparing role-plays so that students learn to effectively switch back and forth between languages, manage features such as overlap, and make relevant contributions to interaction, such as indicating the source of an utterance. Jeffrey Davis illustrates the translation skills that form the basis for teaching consecutive and simultaneous interpreting

Jeffrey E. Davis, Ph.D.: Interpreter Education Program, Miami-Dade Community College, Florida Janice H. Humphrey, Ed.D.: Program of Sign Language Interpretation, Douglas College, New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada Robert Ingram: Program Manager, California Relay Service, Riverbank Melanie Metzger, Ph.D.: Department of ASL, Linguistics, and Interpretation Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. Christine Monikowski, Ph.D.: Department of ASL and Interpreting Education, National Technical Institute of the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York Rico Peterson, Ph.D.: Department of ASL and Interpreting Education, National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York Kyra Pollitt, M.A., RSLI: Sign Languages International (UK base) Huddlestone's Wharf, Newark, England Cynthia B. Roy, Ph.D.: ASL/English Interpreting Program, Department of English, Indiana University/Purdue Elizabeth A. Winston, Ph.D.: Educational Linguistics Research Center, Loveland, Colorado