Theoretical Tools for Educational Interpreters, or “The True Confessions of an Ex-Educational Interpreter”

Claire Ramsey

When I became a sign language interpreter in the 1970s, I was deeply inspired by the politics of access and inclusion. In addition, because I was studying linguistics, I was attracted to the possibility of using my abilities in manipulating symbols to work with languages, in particular, with their meanings and structures. The unique and perhaps odd set of skills that prompts some of us to move from being everyday language users to people who analyze language forms and functions is one that also makes an excellent foundation for interpreting and translating.

However, another set of strengths is needed to work as an interpreter. Without people to use them, languages can easily become abstractions, constructs that barely exist. The best interpreters not only must be able to participate in and correctly render all of the complexities of human interactions into two languages but also must be able to reflect on the effects of interpreting. I spent much of my short career as an interpreter in educational settings from elementary to college level. As an educational interpreter, my analytic skills improved and my short-term memory got a real workout, but my ability to reflect on human interaction seemed to stagnate. Interpreting situations between hearing teachers and deaf children seemed to fall apart—through my hands—for reasons I did not understand.

Trying to assign blame—to myself, to the children, to the teachers—is by its nature unproductive. It did not help me account for the everyday problems I experienced. Worse, one day, I came face-to-face with the fact that some of the school activities that I was interpreting did not make sense to me. Why is it better for profoundly deaf children to attend music class instead of having another reading period? Why did educational opportunity mean seating the deaf child and interpreter at a table in the back of the room with a workbook while the teacher taught addition facts to the hearing children? When these two observations came together, that I rarely felt that I was doing a good job and that some of the school activities I was interpreting for deaf students did not make sense, I had to stop interpreting. Although I was fascinated with the role of language in the social, cultural, and psychological puzzles I observed, I did not have the tools to genuinely understand it. The situations were so complex and the stakes so high, that I could no longer tolerate the fragmentation and my inability to figure it out.

A common assumption is that a critical discussion of educational interpreting is “anti public schools,” a stance I have been accused of taking more than once. Well-grounded reflection, however, does not necessarily grow from opposition. I am not opposed to public school programs for deaf and hard of hearing children. Opposition would be a pointless stance because these programs are widespread, well populated, and in many cases the only available option. Some programs are excellent, others are not, and it is only fair to assume that all are doing their best. In my view, the circumstances of deaf education are so serious that they merit discussion beyond the dualistic possibilities of being either for or against it.

My professional experience, my knowledge of the schooling outcomes of deaf children, and my reading of theory have led me to a cautious, somewhat skeptical perspective on elementary deaf education provided in public schools through educational interpreters. Despite the resources and knowledge available to us, too many deaf students are still not reaching their intellectual and linguistic potential during their school years. For this reason, I have formed a critical, but I hope well-grounded, view of the ideological reorganization that placed interpreters in educational settings with deaf children. Briefly, I have come to see that, for all the resources devoted to offering education in the least restrictive environment, the primary motivation for integrating children who are deaf with those who are hearing rests on a desire to ensure equal educational opportunity and to protect deaf children’s right of access to public education. These desires are not unimportant goals. Indeed, this effort is an extremely unusual step for a society to take, and no other nation in the history of the world has ever made a commitment of this magnitude to children with disabilities. However, the commitment does not guarantee that learning will take place; it is not a commitment about learning or teaching. It is a narrow but sincere commitment to opportunity.

Unfortunately, strategies for providing access for deaf children in public schools are unwieldy, showy, and expensive. Accordingly, the strategies themselves—for example, locating, evaluating, hiring, and integrating interpreters into settings that previously held only hearing children and hearing teachers—have absorbed much attention. Instead of looking to the result of learning and development, the result has become the demonstration of accessibility. Instead of seeing interpreters as a means for providing equal access, interpreters are naively seen as the end in itself. We should not be surprised that deaf children do not learn under these circumstances.

Providing interpreters is not a self-evident strategy for fostering learning. It merely demonstrates that an effort has been made to provide access to educational opportunity. Nonetheless, interpreting is widespread, and it is often very helpful for creating access for deaf children. However, interpreting is often not helpful. Sometimes, having an interpreter is worse than providing no access at all. Many problems are created by thinking that learning can be mediated by an interpreter, and no improvements can occur unless those of us who have experienced these problems ask challenging questions. Because interpreting is sometimes helpful and, sometimes, because it disintegrates and is not helpful, educational interpreting merits critical, respectful, well-grounded attention.

Over the years since I left interpreting, I have studied education and the social and cultural relationships among schooling, deaf students, hearing students, teachers, parents, society, and interpreters. I have also tried to shed the light of theory on my observations of deaf students in public schools (Ramsey 1997). Although many people find the concept of theory to be intimidating, its meaning is quite straightforward. A theory is simply a coherent way to interpret a set of facts and to help predict the possible outcomes of actions or strategies (Cole and Cole 1996). Although few simple or obvious answers have been provided for questions about educational interpreting, theories of language in social context and theories of human development offer models that are potentially helpful tools for those who want to understand and perhaps improve the schooling and learning of deaf students. Theoretical frameworks in sociolinguistics offer analytical categories and accounts of their relationships that clarify some features of interpreted education. Cultural-historical psychology locates human learning and development, especially linguistic and cognitive development, in social settings, and it highlights the fact that individual development cannot take place without participation in social and cultural activities. This chapter briefly outlines these helpful theoretical frameworks, uses them to discuss observations of educational interpreting, and suggests areas that merit further examination.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Sociolinguistics emerged from a crucible of anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and philosophy (e.g., Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Labov 1972). Linguists working in this specialty study the many features of language as it is used in social and cultural groups for a variety of purposes, including education (Cazden, John, and Hymes 1972). The field has adopted research tools from anthropology (Hymes 1964) and has developed other tools for theorizing about and analyzing language in its social context (e.g., Schiffrin 1994). Sociolinguists have also examined ASL, the community of ASL signers, and the social and cultural contexts where ASL comes into contact with English (see Lucas 1989; Lucas and Valli 1992; Ramsey 1997).

Adding to Chomsky’s (1957) theoretical constructs of language “competence” (our grammatical knowledge) and language “performance” (the realization of our knowledge), Hymes (1964) introduced the term communicative competence. This term captures the rule-governed knowledge we depend on to use language appropriately in the range of communication situations that arise in everyday life. Additionally, Hymes (1972) suggested a framework for analysis of language in social settings, which he presented graphically using the mnemonic SPEAKING (see Figure 1).

Using this framework, researchers can extract and examine key features of communication, including the setting and participants, the goals, and the content of the communication as well as the tone, the form and genre of language selected, and the norms observed by speakers within a speech community. These categories function as a starting place from which complex instances of communication can be closely examined.

FIGURE 1. SPEAKING Matrix for Analysis of Language in Social Settings.

Source: Reprinted from D. Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourse, (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell), 142.

Two features of the communication situations identified by Hymes’s SPEAKING matrix deserve a closer look in educational interpreting: setting and participants. The term setting does not refer only to the location where communication is taking place. Rather, it indicates all of the physical, social, and cultural features of the scene that tell us where we are and what should take place there. Some analysts use the term context to describe this feature. For example, Cazden (1988) uses “mental context” to describe all of the knowledge and experience that preschoolers apply to novel school activities like understanding stories in print. While they read or listen to a story, for example, they not only attend to the language and structure of the narrative but also use what they know about people and animals; what they have experienced in their families; and what they like, fear, look forward to, and wish for. All of this knowledge and experience creates the mental context in which the story is embedded and through which these preschoolers construct its meaning. Cazden also views context as a multilevel set of relationships. Although language use can create or redefine a context, contexts, especially those in schools, are not completely created by local participants. Rather, any context is nested within several others. Cazden (1988) applies a hierarchy of contexts that begin in the classroom and extend to the community.¹

Just as the term setting is more complex than it appears, the term participant also requires finer definition. Several kinds of participant can be identified. Careful observation of language interactions reveals what constitutes a participant and the ways that participation can be fostered or discouraged. Goffman’s (1981) analysis of the audience or listener role in discourse contrasts “ratified participants” and “bystanders.” The former are the “addressed ones,” those for whom the speaker’s message is intended. The speaker turns his or her visual attention to the addressed one (or ones) and will relinquish the speaker role to an addressed one. In the context of a classroom, the teacher may call on a student, who becomes the “addressed one” while the other students, still ratified participants, are the “unaddressed ones.” Bystanders, in contrast, are not the intended receivers of the message. They are merely close enough to overhear the message and are not addressed by the speaker. For example, when one is being scolded by a teacher or lunchroom monitor, even though one is surrounded by classmates and peers, one hopes that the other children will voluntarily adopt the bystander role. The other children may hear the scolding and even take it as a lesson, but they do not have to endure the scolding. Bystanders have to occupy only a politely inattentive, unaddressed role, then rapidly pretend to forget the classmate’s embarrassing moment.

The notion of “footing” (Goffman 1974) is also helpful for understanding the ways that language supplies information about participation. Footing is relayed by discourse cues that tell participants what to do in response to a message. When footing changes, the speaker’s relationship with the audience also shifts. An example is a teacher’s use of “Now” at the beginning of a turn. “Now” is a discourse marker that calls attention to “an upcoming idea unit, orientation, and/or participation framework” (Schiffrin 1987, 230). Teachers use “Now” at the beginning of an utterance as a management device to inform students that the activity or the topic is about to change. It tells students that their stance should be attentiveness and preparation to participate.

Although I have presented the field of sociolinguistics only sketchily here, the ideas provide a theoretical and analytical starting place for understanding educational interpreting. Interpreting in classrooms is difficult. It requires maneuvering among several kinds of participants—ratified participants, powerful teachers who hold the floor, and bystanders who politely do not pay attention to conversation to which they have complete access. In this cast, the interpreter, too, must adopt a role—a strange kind of bystanding participant. Interpreters must also understand the setting because the participants, the distribution of turns, and the adoption of roles are determined by settings. Last, the interpreter must understand and express to deaf students the delicate strategies by which a teacher covertly directs the stance of his or her audience.

CULTURAL-HISTORICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Classrooms are complicated settings with a shifting, sometimes ambiguous set of participant roles and many covert but necessary messages that must be decoded by students. These facts in themselves make interpreting a difficult job. Interpreting in classrooms is also critically important because the primary function of communication in classrooms is to foster and to construct learning. Accordingly, another key to understanding the challenges that interpreted education might present for deaf children is to move away from the “input-output” model on which interpreted education rests (content is emitted by the teacher, passes into and out of the interpreter, and enters the student’s mind) and move toward understanding the role that language plays in learning and development.

One can think about learning and development in several ways. The most commonly discussed sources of development are “nature and nurture,” or biological factors and environmental factors, and their respective influences. Cole and Cole (1996) structure an excellent discussion of developmental theory around the possible relationships between nature and nurture. In some domains, “nature,” that is, genetic inheritance and biological maturation, appear to drive development. In other domains, “nurture” appears dominant, and development consists of the shaped and adapted behavior that constitutes learning. A third possible relationship is exemplified in Piaget’s (Piaget 1973; Piaget and Inhelder 1969) constructivist view of development in which nature and nurture play complementary roles and in which individual children are seen as active “constructors” of development through their interactions with the people and world around them.

Cultural-historical psychologists propose a fourth view: that biological factors and “universal features of the environment” (Cole and Cole 1996, 34) each influence development in “the way they combine in a specific cultural-historical context” (38). This view provides a powerful perspective from which to consider educational interpreting. Deaf people confront both biological factors (their physical lack of hearing) and environmental features (a world where most people have intact hearing and use spoken language). For deaf education, nature and nurture combine in a specific cultural-historical context, that is, the school. Despite the widespread “inclusion” of deaf students, the organization of schooling in the United States rests on several critical assumptions: (a) that spoken language acquisition begins at birth, (b) that transmission of culture proceeds from parent to child, and (c) that students will enter schooling with language and cultural knowledge sufficient to participate in the activities that are organized to promote development of basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Of the constructs of cultural-historical psychology, the “Zone of Proximal Development” (Vygotsky 1978) is the best known. Vygotsky held the view that higher cognitive functions such as language and thinking have social origins.² He made the strong claim, based on this view, that learning drives development and that we can learn only through our access to interactions with others. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is a metaphorical space where interactions that promote learning take place, where the learner, who cannot yet do everything that the teacher is trying to teach, and the teacher meet. Through interaction, which is mostly carried out through specific kinds of language (e.g., conversation, questioning, coaching, or language play), the teacher leads the learner toward development.

The characteristics of the “teacher,” or more experienced person, in the ZPD are important. Specifically, to exploit the ZPD, teachers act on several kinds of knowledge. Teachers must have an idea of the way the task unfolds. They must identify what the student does and does not know and must predict what the student will be able to do next. Most important, teachers must ensure that the forms of language that they use are accessible and comprehensible to the learner as they monitor the learner’s engagement with the language and the task. This last characteristic constitutes intersubjectivity, or joint shared attention, which occurs in the “space” between a teacher and a learner. Metaphorically, we can think of inter-subjectivity as a meeting of minds, the basis for shared experience between people. When a mother and infant play with a ball, the mother uses language, gesture, eye gaze, and the ball itself to establish intersubjectivity with the baby, to keep the baby’s attention on the game. Although the baby cannot use adult-like language to confirm his or her shared attention, the baby’s participation (looking at the ball, reaching for it, laughing) does so. Only when intersubjectivity is established can participants in interactions share understanding.

The language processes that establish intersubjectivity are not random or invented on the spot. Rather, they have evolved over time as cultural strategies. In teaching, key processes are establishing and maintaining joint attention. Without intersubjectivity, the teacher’s language will be broadcast through the ZPD, but the receiver will not be tuned in. Thus, without intersubjectivity, this language, though real to the teacher, will not serve the developmental and instructional purposes that he or she intends. A common and straightforward example is a deaf, second grader at a rural school, with an interpreter who is adequately skilled. Like many deaf children, this child’s language development has been delayed, as has his more general knowledge of the world. He can neither sign well nor hear. The interpreter believes that this second grader needs some communication support. Because he looks like a typical second grade boy to the teacher and because his teacher does not know enough about deaf children’s developmental issues, the teacher cannot engage his Zone of Proximal Development and fine-tune instruction. The interpreter’s presence and moving hands have convinced the teacher that the lessons have been well translated for the child (and they have been). But the child’s development is not that of a hearing second grader. Language support by means of an interpreter is not what he needs. What he needs is a teacher who can observe him, directly perceive that the lesson is out of his reach, and adjust instruction so he can meet the teacher part way in his ZPD. The teacher is broadcasting instruction, but the deaf student is in another zone and cannot receive it. In this situation, the most skilled interpreter will assist neither the teacher nor the student, and this child’s schooling will continue to be derailed, as will any future contacts the naive teacher has with deaf children. This brief review does not do justice to the richness of cultural-historical psychology nor to the contemporary psychologists who work in this theory, but it is enough for a beginning examination of educational interpreting and deaf education.

APPLYING THEORETICAL CONSTRUCTS TO THE “FACTS”

During my years as an educational interpreter and researcher in deaf education, I have been well positioned to observe the joint activities of teachers and students. People are prone to explain things to the newcomer, and as an interpreter, I sometimes occupied a type of “novice” status in a public school, especially when deaf students were a novelty and the members of the general education faculty and staff had little knowledge about them. In addition, my later identity as a researcher in a school immediately established a “telling” frame of reference in others. General education faculty and staff members always acknowledged my specialty (deaf education or sign language) but treated me as an initiate to the ways of their particular school. What I report here was either observed by me (some instances are discussed in Ramsey 1997) or related to me by helpful school staff members during my periods of work as an interpreter or fieldwork as a researcher. Other educational interpreters have confirmed that my experience was not unique.

It is important to note that, although this discussion touches on educational interpreters’ language fluency and interpreting skill, as noted above, the work of even the most skilled interpreters can be compromised by the sociolinguistic context of deaf education. The skills issue is both timely and critical but, by itself, provides an incomplete account of educational interpreting. Thus, I take a more systemic view of assumptions about education, interpreting, and deaf children’s learning in the following section.

THE NESTED PERSPECTIVES OF DEAF EDUCATION

A range of perspectives on education of deaf students, access to school, and equal opportunity influences the everyday lives of interpreters and deaf children in schools. Community perspectives reflect the hopes and misconceptions embodied in legislation and public policy. Participants hold perspectives from the very naive to the pragmatic, and views of deaf children’s language needs and abilities reflect categories that have little grounding in reality or in theory. Nonetheless, the perspectives must be examined so their assumptions can be detected.

Community Perspectives

The first set of observations reflect an understanding that the school does not exist by itself. Schools are embedded in communities, some local (a neighborhood, town, or school district) and some regional or national (a state, or the entire United States). Most school personnel hold a good-hearted, optimistic view of the goal of providing education for children with disabilities, which they know is supported by a commitment from their school administrators, their state department of education, and the federal government. These contexts are nested, like Russian dolls. Schools are small relative to districts in which they are embedded. Districts are small relative to states. States are smaller than the federal government, which ironically, sets the policy without necessarily providing the funds to carry out the commitment (for equal educational opportunity for all children or, currently, for “leaving no child behind”). The following syntheses of comments addressed to me in schools indicate that a much larger set of forces frame educational interpreters’ work:

All of these comments, though not directly about interpreting, were generated by general education personnel who worked in elementary schools with programs for deaf and hard of hearing students. My informants had little direct experience with deaf children, although many had attended in-service presentations about Public Law 94-142 or about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). On the surface, their comments reflect knowledge about society’s obligation to provide students with disabilities access to instruction and learning (however poorly understood) within the educational environment. There is nothing wrong with these observations. Indeed, with the exception of the fifth observation, all may be accurate. Nonetheless, most interpreters know that the purpose of schooling goes beyond offering equal rights to deaf students, beyond providing a beneficial experience for hearing students, and beyond creating a more understanding future world.

Daily, I saw that placing deaf and hearing children in the same classroom with an interpreter did not remove all restrictions to learning and peer friendship. Hearing children who do not sign cannot communicate well enough with deaf children to develop relationships. Indeed, since Public Law 94-142 became law in 1975, the most confusing and contentious issue in deaf education has been defining “least restrictive environment” (Commission on Education of the Deaf 1988). For Americans, the discourse of rights is powerful. Even the somewhat abstract goal of protecting or ensuring the rights of a group to move toward a better society is very appealing, as it should be. I have been accused of cynicism when I report my attempts to look beneath the surface of the rhetoric that has been so disturbing in the education of deaf students. Still, those of us who care about deaf children and their learning must do so.

Staff members may express general beliefs about rights and the least restrictive environment; meanwhile, for teachers, tension builds between compliance with the abstractions that define deaf students’ rights and those students’ specific developmental and educational needs. This tension is difficult to resolve (see Ramsey 1997 for a more in-depth description of this tension). In many schools, the participant who is most aware of the tension is the diligent, caring, general education teacher who receives deaf students into his or her classroom for academic subjects. (Teachers of the deaf must also find a way to resolve the tension, but they are usually better prepared to do so.)

The most serious problem is that general comments about the benefits of mainstreaming, especially those that focus on the benefits to hearing students, offer no information about deaf children and the reasons why most of them need fine-tuned, “special” education. At best, these general comments lead to benevolent neglect in that teachers acknowledge the presence of deaf students but do little to engage them. These teachers take limited responsibility for deaf students’ learning because they assume that the interpreter’s presence guarantees that learning occurs. At worst, this neglect creates situations where deaf students are scolded for and evaluated on behavior that is rational (e.g., watching the interpreter instead of looking down at the textbook as the hearing children do) and situations where they are viewed as less-than-competent students when they achieve at levels below those of their hearing peers (see discussion in following sections).

Interestingly, specialists in deaf education who have in-depth knowledge about the kinds of educational support that their deaf students need are less likely to use the vocabulary of “rights” to describe a school setting. The legal organization of school settings is not their prime interest. Rather, they are more inclined to assess a setting according to its comprehensibility to deaf children and according to the likelihood that the children will be able to learn there. This different focus does not mean that deaf children’s rights to access are not also important to the specialist. It simply emphasizes that members of the deaf education staff are more likely to focus their energy on organizing settings where instruction is comprehensible, developmentally appropriate, and engaging rather than focus their energy on achieving integration at any cost.

In the education of deaf children, placement of deaf students in classes with hearing students and the addition of interpreters were intended to be means to an end. In fact, one can identify several ends to schooling, and realizing deaf students’ right to educational access is only one of them. Once access is granted, another objective should certainly be to provide to deaf students vital opportunities to learn and develop, which is what school offers to most hearing children. Unfortunately, since the mid-1970s, mainstreaming and the use of interpreters have become the ends in themselves. Worse, they are sometimes exploited as a demonstration of the benevolence of the school and the general education personnel, even while the deaf students struggle to learn. In the final analysis, then, using protection of rights as the basis for the education of deaf children creates a seductive image that offers general education teachers almost no information about how to help deaf children learn and directs attention away from the learning and developmental goals of education that all students and their parents have a right to expect.

The observations discussed here are generated by the outermost of the nested contexts of schooling—that of the community and, in this case, its legal organization. While this community context is quite powerful in its requirements about the structure of schooling for deaf students, it is also very distant from the students and their needs. The next set of observations brings us closer to students by discussing the notion of participant.

Participants’ Perspectives

At some point in their work, most educational interpreters have made observations such as the following about the behavior of deaf students with interpreters as participants in schooling:

In my interpreter education program in the 1970s, we discussed the fact that deaf people may not watch interpreters. At that time, no one in my cohort was planning a career exclusively in public schools, although many of us interpreted for postsecondary students. We felt that deaf people, like hearing people, could make choices about paying attention to communication, although, of course, it is much more obvious when deaf people fail to attend since a common expectation is that they must watch the interpreter at all times. The reasons for inattentiveness were not our business; interpreters felt no obligation to offer instant replay. (An ASL metaphor, TRAIN ZOOM, encodes a caution about inattention to signers, that if you do not see a signed utterance, it is gone.) Correctly, I think, interpreters considered it disrespectful and bad practice to treat inattentive deaf people like children, to demand their attention—or worse, to make a fuss or report their inattentiveness to the hearing participants.

Yet, when the deaf person is a child and the interpreter is viewed as a member of the team responsible for the child’s learning, then inattentiveness is a more serious matter. No one who is provided with an interpreter, deaf children included, naturally understands how to learn through interaction mediated with an interpreter; every participant needs to be taught the conventions of learning (and teaching) through interpreting. For deaf children who use interpreters, this instruction occurs early and often. Still, even a student who seems to understand his or her own role with respect to interpreters sometimes fails to watch. And even those who watch are often reluctant to use the interpreter to participate with hearing peers and teachers.³ For hardworking interpreters and for teachers who depend on student participation to evaluate learning, it is puzzling and disturbing when deaf students do not fulfill their role in the process. And, again, to hearing teachers and fellow students, the deaf students look less than competent.

Foster’s (1989) research suggests that deaf students provided with interpreting services can easily become marginalized participants in a classroom. Often, they sit together, physically apart from hearing students, to better view the interpreter. In addition, deaf students cannot keep pace with the rapid give and take of spoken English discourse, especially during discussions, because of the necessary interpreting processing time. Last, language itself, the academic variety of English, is not always accessible to them. In this context, deaf students must struggle to find their own identities as genuine peers of the hearing students who have the advantage of direct and immediate access to the teacher. For some, this identity remains out of reach, discouraging participation in class and making integrated settings uncomfortable.

La Bue’s (1998) research is especially revealing here. She analyzed interpreted discourse in a ninth-grade English class within a large (fifty-four deaf and hard of hearing students, twenty-five staff members) middle through high school mainstream program in the public school system, where half of the students attended integrated English courses with interpreters. Her research was designed to examine the extent of deaf students’ access to literacy instruction in the interpreted classes. Although she compared the teacher’s utterances with the interpreter’s rendition, she went beyond looking for equivalence at the level of vocabulary and meaning and carefully examined the teacher’s discourse markers, the functions of those markers, and the ways they were interpreted.

Recall the earlier discussion of footing, the features of discourse that help the audience know their position and responsibilities. Changes in footing are rapid and frequent. Student access to and comprehension of footing shifts are especially critical in classrooms because they are key to understanding the structure of instructional activities and their content. Of particular importance are footing shifts that tell students (the ratified participants) that the teacher has shifted responsibility for discourse to them. When these subtle shifts are expressed, the ratified participants (students, in this case) are obligated to carry out the interaction. When a teacher invites participation, students must bid for turns and answer according to teacher expectations or run the risk of being judged inattentive or, worse, incompetent.

La Bue’s (1998) analysis of the ninth-grade teacher’s discourse identified his routine footing markers. Those that engaged student participation referred to shared knowledge (“y’know”) and linked propositions (“I mean” and “so”). Next, La Bue analyzed the interpreter’s signed rendition, looking for equivalent markers. What she found, among other problems, was that the interpreter did not express these markers to the deaf students. The teacher’s footing shift was not interpreted, the deaf students did not receive the invitation to participate, and they did not participate because they had no access to the language markers that shifted responsibility from teacher to student. La Bue suggests that deaf students with interpreters can unintentionally be reduced to a different participant category, the “modified bystander” (220). They are, indeed, ratified participants in school. But interpreting limits their access to participation in such a way that they can “tune in” to some content without participating. Although the incomplete interpretation was not intended, in fact, the discourse conventions that invite participation have not been directed to them at all, so despite their true ratified participant status, they are never the addressed ones.

La Bue’s work accounts for educational interpreters’ observations that deaf students fail to participate, even when directly called on by the teacher. Language interaction, especially language interaction in classrooms, is dense and rich, and in accordance with our cultural expectations, is intended for groups of participants who have full access to the complete message. Most hearing students either enter the classroom already communicatively competent or have the access they need to rapidly gain the competence necessary to successfully take on the student role. In contrast, many deaf students do not enter school with the specialized communicative competence needed for taking on the student role, and they likely do not have access to complete language interactions from which they could acquire the competence. Unfortunately, training a deaf child in the conventions of an interpreted education will not eliminate his or her developmental linguistic needs.

Three additional issues must be considered here. The first is the lack of preparation and the resulting limited skill of most educational interpreters. Few training opportunities exist for those who want to specialize in educational interpreting (Dahl and Wilcox 1990). More disturbing, a high proportion of classroom interpreters likely have skills that are so basic and undeveloped that they can express only some information, which contains errors at the levels of vocabulary, grammar, and discourse (Schick, Williams, and Bolster 1999).⁴ La Bue’s work suggests the serious consequences of discourse errors and omissions and makes clear that unqualified interpreters cannot serve either as those who relate information or as those who provide language models.

The preparation of educational interpreters has not kept pace with the enthusiastic inclusion of deaf students in public schools. Many school districts, especially those in rural areas, feel fortunate to locate anyone who can sign. Few administrators have the personnel to evaluate interpreting ability; worse, most do not understand the critical difference between signing and interpretation.⁵ Interpreters are rarely evaluated before hiring, few hold any kind of interpreting certification (Jones, Clark, and Soltz 1997), and many are never evaluated. American parents expect their children’s teachers to have academic and practical training as well as to hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Only in emergency circumstances would they allow an unqualified person to teach their children. Yet, educational interpreters, who are arguably at least as important as teachers, are routinely accepted without any kind of professional preparation.

The second intervening issue is the preparation of general education teachers to work with deaf children. Most teachers have no experience working with deaf children and have almost no knowledge about their complex and varied developmental histories and their resulting highly individualized special educational needs (see Scruggs and Mastropieri [1996] for a telling report of general education teacher attitudes toward inclusion). Like the general public, they tend to believe that having an interpreter in the classroom is all that is necessary to “include” the deaf students. Few hearing people know sign language, and even fewer can evaluate the fidelity of interpreted messages. In my experience, general education teachers are surprised when they learn that their deaf students are weak readers, that their English vocabularies are small and concrete (Marschark 1997), and that their written English is basic and sometimes error ridden.

On an intellectual level, it is not difficult to provide information to help teachers understand the classroom challenges that they and their deaf students face. The task takes time (which no teacher has enough of), and planning, and willingness on the part of school personnel at all levels. Yet, even assuming that the information is provided and that teachers comprehend it, hearing speakers of English in teaching roles have difficulty altering their patterns of communication so interpreters can do their work and so deaf students can be part of the classroom speech community. The most obvious pattern is the pacing of teacher discourse and the rapid give and take of turns. Every competent educational interpreter has asked teachers to slow down and has explained processing time, including the fact that the interpretation may be three to five sentences behind the speaker. Again, intellectually, this delay makes sense. In practice, however, control of habitual patterns of speaking is rarely possible or long lasting because these patterns are almost completely unconscious.⁶ Similarly, when several children call out answers simultaneously, interpreters remind teachers that they can interpret for only one person at a time. Again, though this limitation makes perfect sense, in practice, simultaneous responses are difficult to control.

La Bue’s (1998) research describes a teacher who is more than willing to have deaf students in his class. However, this teacher does not know that his engagement strategies and invitations to participate are not being interpreted to them, and he does not realize that the deaf students have almost no opportunities to display their knowledge or to ask questions during class. Rather, like other general education teachers (e.g., Ramsey’s 1997 informant, “Mrs. Rogers”), he accounts for their classroom behavior by resorting to his underlying knowledge about high school students, believing them to be unsophisticated and, in the case of one deaf student, more immature than the hearing students. His judgments are not only incorrect but also potentially damaging in the high-stakes context of high school education.

The third issue, as Winston (1992) points out, is that a certain amount of classroom interaction is not interpretable. Winston’s research focus is the organization of instruction and the way it determines the tasks that deaf students must undertake to have access and to participate. Her primary comment on instructional organization is that it assumes that students can both hear the teacher and see what is going on. Profoundly deaf students, obviously, have access only to that which is visual, which creates “a basic difference in accessibility to information” (60), even with an interpreter. Winston found that lectures are interpretable, but she notes that they are relatively uncommon in elementary grades. Instead, question-and-answer formats dominate. In Winston’s analysis, the interpretability of this discourse form depends on the teacher’s style and pacing as well as on the topic of discussion. If it is built around print texts where the student must search for information to answer, a task designed to take advantage of both hearing and sight, then even the best interpreter cannot eliminate the disadvantage that deaf students face.

Other language routines are common among teachers—speaking while writing on the board, speaking while asking students to read along in a book or to correct a paper, speaking from the back of a darkened room while showing slides, placing students in small groups for work, speaking to the class while they are doing seat work to bring an important point to their attention, leading the flag salute from the front of the room while students turn to recite the pledge to a flag hanging in the back of the room. In all of these routine speech situations, the deaf student is at a disadvantage; even with a highly skilled interpreter, he or she will not have the “same” learning experience as hearing children.

Perspectives about Deaf Children’s Language Development

Finally, teachers and interpreters describe deaf students themselves and their observations of those students’ schooling outcomes. My general education teacher informant, “Mrs. Rogers” (Ramsey 1997) offered versions of the first two comments below. The third observation is my own, from my work as an educational interpreter in elementary through postsecondary settings. An analysis, which follows, based on cultural-historical psychology helps to account for these observations.

Even the most naive observer knows that children who are born deaf have infancies that are quite different from those of hearing children. Whether you take an audiological, medical, psycholinguistic, or cultural approach, the underlying fact is that deaf infants do not have sufficient hearing to acquire spoken English in the typical way. Although age of diagnosis is likely to drop as universal newborn screening spreads, diagnosis of hearing loss and the age when language interventions begin are disturbingly late. Padden and Ramsey (1996) found that the average age of detection of hearing loss was one year in a sample of eighty-three fifth- and seventh-grade residential deaf students; average age at first educational contact was 2.34 years. In a sample of fifty-two fourth- and seventh-grade public school deaf students, average age of detection was 2.2 years, and first educational contact was 3.1 years.

Lack of hearing coupled with late diagnosis creates a developmental linguistic emergency. In our species, acquisition of language begins at birth; indeed, late first-language acquisition is so atypical that it is virtually impossible to find except in the case of deaf children (Mayberry 1993). In all cultural contexts, development unfolds to ensure that most of that language is mastered within five or six years. But the circumstances of deaf children’s development (with some exceptions) do not match the broader design. The unavoidable fact is that, through no fault of their own, most deaf children have a late start at language acquisition. This late start has consequences for all areas of their lives, but it especially threatens their schooling. In our industrialized, information-steeped society, schooling is organized on the assumption that children enter their years of formal education with native command of their first language, “ready to learn.”

Cultural-historical psychology, as noted, locates developing individuals in the larger context of culture. Theory does not specify which culture (e.g., Deaf culture, Mexican culture, hearing culture). Rather, the definition of culture from this point of view is quite broad. Culture is what defines us as human beings, “the unique environment of human life” (Cole 1996, 327). Cole further reminds us that “culture comes into being wherever people engage in joint activity over time” (301). This unique environment has evolved over the histories of groups to foster the development of the individual and to create and maintain his or her connection to his or her social group. An individual can neither invent culture nor develop or survive in isolation from others. We develop through participation in the activities of those around us, usually parents or caregivers, older siblings, and others who have been around for a longer than we have. Language not only is a component of the environment of human life but also encodes culture in words and serves as the primary vehicle for transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

The notion of culture has become clouded in deaf education. Because the term is so heavily contested, one could easily assume that all discussions of culture in the context of deaf education are discussions about Deaf culture.⁷ This assumption is not correct. Cole’s (1996) “garden metaphor” offers a general way to think about culture and its role in human development and, I hope, an objective way to consider the developmental difficulties that underscore deaf children’s struggles in school. Cole describes what many of us remember as a kindergarten project, planting a seed in damp soil, keeping it in the dark until it sprouts, then placing it in the light to grow. If you leave the jar in the dark, the seed will stop developing and die; it cannot grow without sunlight. “Like a seed in soil, the human child must be provided with sufficient support to maintain life; it must be kept warm enough and fed, or it will die” (200).

Unlike nasturtiums, babies come pre-specified, not to sprout leaves, but to acquire language. Babies born deaf also have this inborn capacity, but in most deaf babies, language does not “sprout and flower.” In cultural-historical terms, deaf babies cannot hear spoken language—that cultural medium that nourishes spoken language and that works perfectly for hearing babies—and thus, spoken language contains nutrients that are not helpful for deaf babies. Babies who cannot hear spoken language require a somewhat different growing medium to acquire human language, for example, a culturally designed medium that fosters acquisition of a signed language. In a “signed language medium,” culturally designed support rests on several centuries of problem-solving adaptations undertaken by people who could not make use of spoken language. To our knowledge, only cultures of Deaf people provide this kind of support. Indeed, this support is the truly unique feature of Deaf culture and is the one most worth educational consideration.

It is a mistake to think that deaf babies do not get culturally designed support in the “spoken language” medium. They do. But they simply cannot take advantage of it to use their inborn language capacity. Cole (1996) uses cultural-historical terms to describe the situation of deaf babies born to hearing families with no access to a culture of Deaf people. The deaf child is included in numerous culturally mediated social interactions in the spoken language medium: families eat together, babies go with others on errands or to church, they are toilet trained. “They live in a world that is suffused with meaning, although they lack access to the specifically linguistic behavior that fills the gaps between actions” (202). Even so, like all children, deaf children have active minds that develop ways to represent the world. This capacity is enough to allow a kind of participation with others in many activities; it is a myth that deaf children begin their educations with no communication ability and no knowledge of the world. But this capacity is not enough for typical language acquisition to occur. For typical language acquisition to unfold, babies need unrestricted and undistorted access to that language as it is used in everyday life.

Goldin-Meadow’s (1985) work demonstrates that individual deaf children without access to signing are able to invent very rudimentary systems of home sign, uttered in one- to three-sign sequences. However, their home sign does not develop beyond this level. Although it is communicative, it does not constitute a complete human language. Rather, home signs are a response to a developmental emergency, indicating development that is atypical. To return to the garden metaphor, the growing medium of a child in this situation is not nourishing enough. Language acquisition requires full access and participation. Unfortunately, children who do not have full access to their family’s language, used in culturally organized contexts, will not develop it, even if they can communicate and participate in some of the actions that occur in these contexts.⁸

To complicate matters, in many cases we cannot predict with any confidence that exposure to one or more of the languages and modes of communication possible in deaf education (spoken English, a manual code for English, American Sign Language) will lead to a native-like language outcome for the child. A proportion of the deaf children who use interpreters in elementary school do not have the language ability necessary to understand the interpreter’s signing.⁹ In my work, I was usually told what each child’s language preference and strength was supposed to be. Often, I was told that the child used Pidgin Signed English (or PSE), the teacher’s term. (Teachers continue to use this label, although a more linguistically descriptive and accurate term exists: contact signing. I use the informants’ terms here rather than put words in their mouths.)¹⁰

PSE is an especially problematic term when applied to deaf children. First, it is technically inaccurate. Although PSE is signed, it is not a true pidgin (Lucas and Valli 1992). Although it has an assumed relationship with English, that relationship is unclear. PSE is not a form of English that is recognized or understood by typical native speakers. More seriously, in educational settings, the use of the term PSE is not helpful because it often describes, not the existence of language ability, but its absence. Unfortunately, in everyday language, it has become a default category for students who do not sign ASL and do not exhibit complete grasp of one of the forms of manually coded English (or MCE).¹¹ Nonetheless, interpreters, teachers, and parents continue to use this term as if it were the name of a language variety. As with all languages, a great deal of variation exists in ASL (Lucas, Bayley, and Valli 2001; Lucas and Valli 1992). Among adults, a signed variety best called “contact signing” (Lucas and Valli 1992) arises when ASL and English come into contact. It emerges as a result of specific social contexts (not always the result of “contact” between Deaf and hearing people) and is generated by people who usually are fluent in both ASL and English. “Contact signing” labels only one of the linguistic and social sources of language variation among adult signers. Still, it is not a satisfactory educational term, at least for deaf children, because most students called PSE signers do not likely have mastery of both ASL and English.

Given the developmental circumstances of deaf children, several possible sources of signing that are neither ASL nor MCE are evident. In some cases, PSE is actually “learner signing with ASL as the target.” In other cases, PSE might better be called “learner signing with MCE as the target.” Among other possibilities, PSE can also be (a) the signing of a late learner with either target, (b) the highly idiosyncratic signing of a child who has received degraded signed input, or (c) signing generated by an ASL native in an effort to accommodate to an educational context where print English is the dominant variety and the signing ability of the children is unknown. The relevance of these varying sources for education and an interpreted education is not a trivial matter. These varying sources of so-called “PSE” indicate extreme differences in language development. An ASL native who is accommodating will have very different educational needs from a child who has had such degraded sign input that he or she has mastered no conventional language. The continued use of the term PSE camouflages a very real educational problem.

An additional problem with PSE as a descriptor of child signing is the focus on language forms (e.g., “word order”¹²) rather than language use in context. In my experience with young deaf signers, I have observed that their signing is idiosyncratic in form and suffers pragmatically. Their discourse abilities vary greatly. As discussed above, these disadvantages will affect their ability to participate in school, to engage with learning, and to demonstrate their areas of competence as students. Given deaf students’ developmentally strained histories, their limited real-life opportunities for developing as users of either English or ASL, and the possible ideologies that guide parental and teacher language choices, no one term can unambiguously categorize the signing of most deaf students in public school programs. Accordingly, even the most skilled interpreter has difficulty fashioning a target language for his or her work with the child that can serve as a medium for information transmission (a medium—not a language model, which interpreting should never be viewed as providing).

To return to the observations, deaf children struggle to learn English, in part, because they have limited or distorted access to it and, in most cases, because they get a very late start. The fact that languages are the primary media by which teaching and learning occur also partly explains deaf students’ struggles to learn the content of schooling. Even if exceptionally skilled interpreting is available to the deaf child, the child will likely not be able to take full advantage of it. Recall that Cole (1996), while recognizing the culturally organized activities that surround the deaf child, also notes the developing child’s need for access to these activities. Although educational interpreters appear to provide access (and, in some cases, they do), in many cases, this “access” does not prove sufficient to support development and learning (e.g., La Bue 1998; Winston 1992, 1994).

BELOW THE SURFACE OF EDUCATIONAL INTERPRETING

The theoretical tools discussed in this chapter suggest new questions about educational interpreting. Deaf children’s needs are serious, and because educational interpreting now plays a substantial role in their education, it merits well-grounded research. Several urgent topics lend themselves to examination by sociolinguists. First, the context (or contexts) of educational interpreting need to be carefully defined. By itself, this topic is of interest. However, it will also help participants in educational interpreting understand the distinction between the means of providing educational access and its ends (i.e., learning and development). We also need grounded descriptions and analyses of the interactions of interpreting and interpreters with other sociolinguistic features of educational settings, in particular, the effects of interpreting on student participation. Last, although interpreters and teachers understand that processing time is necessary, we know very little about the extents to which English-speaking teachers and students can tolerate the delays necessitated by interpreter processing time during instructional discourse. This tolerance must be examined in light of knowledge about the pacing of instructional discourse in noninterpreted settings, where the pause between a teacher’s question and subsequent student response averages less than one second (Rowe 1987).

Cultural-historical psychology provides theoretical and analytical tools that are helpful in two ways. First, it provides a broad and very basic definition of culture that is stripped of the ideologies, discussions of “learning styles,” and lists of traits that routinely appear in discussions of bicultural and multicultural education. Second, it offers foundational constructs for examining development and learning, for example, the Zone of Proximal Development and joint shared attention. Again, since educational interpreting has become the medium of instruction for so many deaf students, we must look beyond the accuracy and fidelity of interpreted renditions to its functions. In our current state of knowledge, we know nothing about the ways an interpreter affects the establishment and maintenance of joint shared attention in teaching interactions. The teacher-interpreter-deaf student triad must be examined carefully to determine whether intersubjectivity between teacher and student is possible when an interpreter is in the middle, whether establishing intersubjectivity among three people is possible, and if so, how participants manage it. The real issue is the potential obstacle of the interpreter, which makes the teacher-student connection indirect. Last, it is urgent that cultural descriptions of Deaf people (which make perfect sense) not be extended to deaf students without careful reflection. Most of the current population of deaf students had atypical early language development. Very likely, their ability to engage with the language and possibly the content of schooling, especially through interpreting, has been compromised to some degree by delayed first-language acquisition. Making unwarranted assumptions about their communicative competence (e.g., applying “PSE” as a default) and placing an interpreter in their classrooms will not compensate for their language learning needs.

In Nebraska where I lived for several years, high standards for educational interpreter skill and knowledge were written into law. As we work to improve the interpreting services offered to deaf students, we have a parallel obligation. We must continue to question the effectiveness of even the most competent interpreting as a medium of instruction. Although judiciously providing highly skilled educational interpreters can contribute to civil rights and educational goals, interpreting should never be seen as a perfect conduit for education or a complete replacement for teaching. Deaf students deserve access to genuine opportunities for learning, and it is not yet clear that these opportunities can be brought about through educational interpreters.

NOTES

1. Other metaphors are possible. For example, Cole (1996) portrays context as a set of concentric circles, with the child representing the most central circle and the community, the outermost.

2. This view contrasts slightly with American educational psychology tradition, which is to locate and examine thinking, language, and problem-solving abilities primarily in individual students’ abilities. For this reason, in deaf education, we have a great deal of knowledge and many hypotheses derived from experimental research about deaf children’s abilities to manipulate language and solve problems, for example, the “reader-based” variables that contribute to their problems learning to read (Paul [1998] provides a clear and complete discussion). We have less knowledge about deaf children’s social worlds and the quality, content, and outcomes of their interactions with others.

3. A University of Nebraska, Lincoln (UNL), student reported observing deaf students dash away from the interpreter to join other deaf children in hiding during recess (L. Orta, UNL graduate student in deaf education, personal communication, September 13, 2000).

4. When I worked in elementary school mainstream programs, I was unusually highly trained. I had graduated from a community college interpreter training program, which I attended after I completed a bachelor’s in linguistics, and I also held a master’s degree in linguistics. Even if I had wanted to continue working as an educational interpreter, however, I could not have afforded to do so because the pay was so low that I could not support myself.

5. As an analogy, a hearing person who takes one or two semesters of French may be able to speak basic French. However, this person does not have the ability to simultaneously interpret from English into French or vice versa. Nevertheless, a task similar to this one is what educational interpreters are called on to carry out.

6. I hold one degree in sign language interpreting and another in sign language linguistics, yet I am almost unable to control the pacing of my instructional speech so deaf students are equal participants. When possible, I prefer to teach using only one language in a class, ASL.

7. The term deaf indicates having the condition of limited, nonexistent, or impaired hearing, which can be measured by an audiologist. The term Deaf indicates the culture of Deaf people, not the condition of having impaired hearing.

8. Interestingly, Cole notes that the opposite it also true. Children who have access to language but do not have access to culturally organized interactions with other people also fail to develop full language (e.g., children who are left alone in front of a TV that is broadcasting a foreign language do not acquire that language).

9. It is important here to distinguish this problem—that the child does not have sufficient language fluency of any kind to understand the interpreter’s signing of the teacher’s message—from an issue that sometimes arises in interpreting for Deaf adults. When the interpreter’s language fluency and that of the Deaf audience might be mismatched or when the interpreter has selected the wrong variety of a signed language for the Deaf audience, then understanding may also be compromised. The reasons are quite different, though, and the issue in those situations is not the Deaf person’s language competencies but the interpreter’s choice of language.

10. Woodward (1973) provides an early description of PSE.

11. The prominent MCE is Signing Exact English (Gustason, Pfetzing, and Zawolkow 1972).

12. Word order arguments are often based on the incorrect belief that ASL does not share a basic subject-verb-object syntactic structure with many of the world’s languages, including English.

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An earlier version of this chapter was delivered as a plenary session at the National Educational Interpreting Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 5, 2000. Portions of this chapter appear in Ramsey (2001).