According to the 40th Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, 76.8% of deaf students were in mainstream classrooms for at least 40% of the school day in 2016 (U.S. Department of Education, 2018). Public Law (PL) 94–142, the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, and Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provide for sign language interpreters for deaf students in schools in order to ensure communication access; however, neither law defines the roles of educational interpreters, and there has been no research on the impact of roles beyond interpreting on communication access in the K–12 classroom.

Access to Mainstream Classrooms

Access to a classroom is inherently unequal between deaf and hearing students, and although an interpreter can help to close the gap, they are not a panacea for these inequalities (Winston, 2004). A typical classroom takes advantage of students’ abilities to listen and watch simultaneously. For a deaf student, much of this information is accessed through visual means and tends to occur sequentially, thus requiring more time to access the same information (Shaw & Jamieson, 1997). Because there is no more time to be had, a deaf student often misses some information.

In fact, Shaw and Jamieson (1997) found that a third-grade deaf student had access to only 60% of the classroom instruction that the hearing students experienced while the interpreter served as a tutor and a direct instructor, in addition to interpreting class content. The time taken for these additional duties is implicated by the authors in the loss of access to cultural discourse information, including transition statements, rules for interaction, and understanding of others’ thoughts, knowledge, and behavior.

Another study looked at parallel and divergent interpretation, or the amount of the interpretation that matched or differed from the source message, and found that in a third-grade classroom the amount of communication that was interpreted as delivered averaged 33.2% (Wolbers et al., 2012). Some of the divergent interpreting was attributed to interpreter role changes, including tutoring; functioning as an adult caretaker; engaging in other work responsibilities; and allowing direct communication to occur between the deaf student and another person. More than 80% of the divergent interpretations were omissions from the spoken message, thus impeding access to the classroom discourse.

Lack of access to the primary home language often hinders acquisition and development of language, leading to deaf students having language delays and needing extensive exposure to language to impact their linguistic and cognitive development (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004). Access to social communication is as important to language development, and thus cognitive development, as access to the academic information (Hoff, 2009) in the classroom. Although direct communication, and hence direct instruction, would be a more natural exposure, one of the goals of mainstreaming students is to provide that interaction and exposure through the medium of an educational interpreter (Winston, 2004).

Roles of Educational Interpreters

An educational interpreter is hired typically because a deaf student needs access to discourse in the classroom. This is the educational interpreter’s primary role: to interpret and to provide access to the auditory features of the school environment (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001; Humphrey & Alcorn, 2007; Seal, 2004; Winston, 2004). Educational interpreters have a specialized set of skills and knowledge to do their job adequately (Lawson, 2012; Winston, 2004).

Many attempts have been made to define and describe the role of an interpreter. The classic metaphors are “helper,” “conduit” or “machine,” “communication facilitator,” “bilingual–bicultural,” and “ally” (Humphrey & Alcorn, 2007). In educational interpreting, Smith (2010) defined “five primary categories of what educational interpreters do during the course of their daily work” (p. 93), including assessing and responding to the situation, interpreting, optimizing resources, interacting with others, and performing assistant-type duties. As seen in these categories, interpreters are often asked to fill other roles in addition to the primary role of interpreting, either simultaneously with interpreting or at designated times apart from interpreting.

Jones (1999) divided the additional duties into different roles that he conceptualized as blades on a windmill: interpreter role, tutor role, aide role, and consultant role. Kluwin (1994) defined four categories of interpreters: professional interpreters, educational interpreters, communication aides, aides who interpreted. Jones et al. (1997) surveyed 222 interpreters from Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska, and defined 19 different activities that interpreters reported performing. Antia and Kreimeyer (2001) followed a group of students, interpreters, and teachers through 3 years, noting a difference in responsibilities based on job title. The duties have been classified according to the roles filled, job titles, and functions, but despite all these classifications of the duties involved in educational interpreting, there was very little focus on the impact on the language environment provided to the student.

An often-cited perspective on the interpreting roles focuses on the age and experience of the deaf student to determine the duties (Zawolkow & DeFiore, 1986). The idea is that younger children need more support and have less ability to differentiate adult roles, and so an interpreter may fill more roles with these students, but as they grow older, the interpreter narrows the roles filled until, by the secondary level, the interpreter is interpreting with very few additional responsibilities (Humphrey & Alcorn, 2007). This paradigm has been described as the “inverted triangles of responsibility” (Davino, 1985), or simply the “inverted triangles,” as shown in Figure 1, and reinterpreted as the “distribution of responsibilities” (Lawson & Hamrick, 2011), as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1. Inverted triangles of responsibility (Davino, 1985). Triangles representing the proportion of responsibility held by the interpreter and student at various levels of schooling.

Figure 2. Distribution of responsibility (Lawson & Hamrick, 2011). Congruent triangles representing the proportion and shift of responsibilities between the interpreter and the student at various levels of schooling.

Table 1. Activities, Duties, and Responsibilities Performed by Interpreters, Categorized by Role and Function, as Reported in the Literature

Note. Table compiled from Antia and Kreimeyer, 2001; Commission on Education of the Deaf, 1988; Dean and Pollard, 2005; Frishberg, 1990; Humphrey and Alcorn, 1995; Jones, 1999; Jones et al., 1997; Kluwin, 1994; Schick and Brown, 2011; Seal, 2004; Shaw and Jamieson, 1997; Siegel, 1995; Stedt, 1992; Winston, 1985, 1990, 1998; Wolbers et al., 2011; Yarger, 2005; Zawolkow and DeFiore, 1986.

The activities, responsibilities, and duties reported in the literature were categorized by role and function and are shown in Table 1. It is neither a recommended nor a best practices list because they include items that particular authors stated interpreters should not be expected to perform.

Defining Roles and Responsibilities

There is a lack of clear role definitions for interpreters; confusion among teachers, parents, administrators, students, and interpreters themselves as to what interpreters should do; and even within a single school, expectations differ among different employees (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001; Humphrey & Alcorn, 2007; Lawson, 2012; Fitzmaurice, 2018). Formalizing the role of the educational interpreter is difficult because of the number of parties involved and the level at which the duties are determined. State laws are guiding interpreter qualifications and role decisions (RID, 2020). Educational administrators, who often do not have backgrounds in deafness or interpreting, are writing the district job descriptions (Fitzmaurice, 2018; Jones et al., 1997; Winston, 1998). Interpreters, who are related service providers, are often viewed as paraprofessionals and frequently not consulted. Unfortunately, the lack of defined roles may lead interpreters and teachers to do what is convenient instead of what is professional, which serves to erode the level of services provided to the deaf student (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001).

The skills and knowledge required to interpret, however, are in line with those of professionals, such as speech-language pathologists and school counselors, and by collaborating with the other professionals at their school, interpreters become viewed as professionals (Dean & Pollard, 2005; Jones, 1999) and become more resistant to duties that are considered unprofessional (Kluwin, 1994). In order to better define the professional roles and responsibilities of educational interpreters, additional research is needed on the impact of interpreters on inclusion education, the effects of different roles, and even on what interpreters do in general (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001; Jones et al., 1997; Winston, 2004). Other necessary research includes information on the perspectives of all parties involved in educational interpreting: interpreters, teachers, administrators, related service providers, parents, and students (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001). More empirical research will help to clarify what interpreters do, what works in terms of roles and responsibilities for access, and what will best serve all students in an inclusion environment.

If the primary role of the educational interpreter is to provide access to the spoken discourse of the classroom, the impact on that access helps to inform the number of roles and the manner in which additional roles can be performed. This chapter will attempt to fill some of the gaps in the literature by addressing the question of what percentage of a class an interpreter spends as an interpreter versus filling other roles in the classroom and, more importantly, what percentage of spoken communication in the classroom a deaf student sees interpreted when an educational interpreter is filling multiple roles in a classroom.

Method

The researcher chose a Biology I inclusion class designed to prepare students for the science exam requirements for graduation because it was likely to provide a large variety in terms of lexicon and did not focus specifically on English language or numbers. The class was a coteaching environment, with the science teacher instructing the students and the special education teacher observing and supporting the instruction. Both teachers had 10 or more years of teaching experience and had worked with interpreters in the classroom previously.

The educational interpreter graduated with a bachelor’s degree in educational interpreting, did not hold any interpreting credentials, but had worked as a K–12 interpreter for 4 years. As defined by her school system, this educational interpreter was qualified.

The deaf student was a 10th-grade female student whose primary language in the home is Spanish. She had educational experience at a school for the deaf, accessed classroom discourse primarily through sign language at her current school, and had been using an educational interpreter in school for the last 2 years.

The class was video recorded with two cameras, and field notes were taken to capture the spoken language, the interpretation, the roles the interpreter filled, and the activities occurring in the classroom over the course of five consecutive class sessions. Semistructured interviews with the interpreter, teachers, and deaf student were also recorded at the conclusion of classroom recording to collect qualitative information on assigned responsibilities and reasons for role changes. The last 3 days of videos were used in order for the class to become comfortable with the researcher and her equipment, giving the data the highest amount of validity. From the coded data, the research examined the frequency and percentage of the status of the interpretation, interpreted or not, as well as the frequency and percentage of the roles and activities that occurred in the classroom in order to discover any relationships among these variables.

Coding Videos

The information from the video recordings and field notes were analyzed for target behaviors by two trained raters, bound to confidentiality. The videos were coded in ELAN (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan) using 5-second intervals. Five seconds was considered an ideal interval length because at 150 words per minute (approximate speed of typical extemporaneous speech; Seleskovitch, 1998), 5 seconds would contain approximately 10 to 15 words, providing enough information to determine whether that segment is being interpreted or not and what role the interpreter is assuming during that time.

“Interpreting” an interval was defined as facilitating communication between two conversational modes of languages, spoken English and sign language, and, under this definition, did not include translating between written English and sign language. Priority was given to academic discourse in rating the intervals.

For each 5-second interval of video, the raters determined the status of the interpretation: fully interpreted, partially interpreted, no spoken discourse interpreted, not applicable (for student comments when there was no accompanying teacher discourse or when there were intervals of silence), and questionable for any segment in which either the spoken language or the interpreted message was impossible to classify owing to lack of auditory or visual information. Additionally, the raters determined the role the interpreter was filling at that time: interpreter role, direct instructor role (frequently called the tutor role), assistant role, consultant role, or other for any functions the interpreter performed outside of these roles. Finally, the raters looked at the primary activity of the classroom during that interval: lecture, discussion, group work, read aloud, and independent work.

The researcher obtained frequency information for each classification by calculating their total number of occurrences and associated percentages and then using that data in cross- tabulation matrices to compare status of interpretation, role, and activity in a variety of ways. Interrater reliability was calculated using percent agreement over approximately 22% of the video time, arriving at 83% agreement overall, which exceeded 80%, the target for reliability.

Results

Quantitative Analysis

After data collection, the last three classes (3 hr and 50 min of recording) of the five classes were divided into 2,758 5-second intervals for coding. The majority of intervals were not interpreted (40%), with interpreted intervals accounting for 36% (32% fully interpreted and 4%, partially interpreted) of the total (Figure 3). Intervals for which the raters either could not determine the interpreting status or there was silence in the classroom accounted for 8% of the analyzed portion of the video.

Figure 3. Intervals by status of interpretation.

Figure 4. Status of interpretation by role.

From the graph in Figure 4 it is apparent that the interpreter functioned as a direct instructor in nearly 60% of the intervals analyzed, leaving just over 40% of the intervals under the interpreter role. The roles of “assistant,” “consultant,” and “other” accounted for less than 5% of all the intervals and thus will not be examined further in this analysis.

Figure 5 reveals that almost half of the intervals analyzed were classified as independent work (47%). An additional 44% of the activities were classified as lecture or discussion, with those activities carrying nearly equal weight. There was no evidence of group work in any of the video collected. Read aloud and “questionable” (unable to be classified owing to lack of audio or video evidence) activities accounted for less than 10% of all the intervals. The classes observed were focused on review and preparation for the end of course test, a graduation requirement, and involved more independent work on completing study guides than would be typical of a class earlier in the semester.

Figure 5. Status of interpretation by activity.

Figure 6. Status of interpretation per role.

Coded intervals were cross-tabulated in terms of the number and percentage of intervals that were interpreted, partially interpreted, or not interpreted per role (Figure 6), and then per activity (Figure 7). Most of the intervals the educational interpreter filled as an interpreter were fully interpreted (78%), but when she was performing the direct instructor role most of the intervals were not interpreted (61%) or inapplicable (25%).

Figure 7. Status of interpretation per activity.

A majority of the lecture was fully interpreted (58%), as was the discussion (69%). However, 25% of the lecture was not interpreted, and 23% of the discussion was not interpreted (Figure 7). Independent work was largely not interpreted (57%) or not applicable (31%), and 9% of those intervals were interpreted. When silence is factored out and student comments are allowed to remain, 85% of teacher and student discourse was not interpreted during independent work.

To examine the interrelatedness of role and activity separate from the status of the interpretation, a cross-tabulated matrix was designed. The primary roles the educational interpreter filled during the analyzed classes were direct instructor and interpreter, and the most frequent activities were independent work, lecture, and discussion (Figure 8). Lecture (76%) and discussion (72%) activities were spent mostly as an interpreter, whereas the remaining time was largely spent providing direct instruction. Independent work was performed mostly in the direct instructor role (81%), whereas most of the remaining time was spent as an interpreter (Figure 9).

Analysis of the status of the interpretation and role filled in terms of classroom activity yielded further information (Figure 10). Only roles and activities that exhibited the highest frequencies were used. The intervals identified as lecture showed the educational interpreter worked almost entirely as an interpreter or direct instructor during that time, and interpreting occurred in about 80% of the intervals. The data showed a similar situation for discussion activities, although interpreting was about three-quarters of those intervals. Independent work exhibited about 80% of its intervals as being not interpreted or not applicable while in the direct instructor role, with 54% of the intervals being teacher discourse that was not interpreted and the remaining being uninterpreted student comments and silence.

Figure 8. Role by activity.

Figure 9. Role per activity.

Qualitative Analysis

Each participant interviewed—the deaf student, the science teacher, the special education teacher, and the educational interpreter—was asked to define the responsibilities of an interpreter. Each person described, in their own words, the interpreter’s job as transmitting information between the teacher and the student. The interpreter in this class was not asked to perform any duties outside of this definition but admitted she took on more responsibilities due to her perception of “the understanding level of the student.” She felt she could help the student understand more when communicating directly with her as a direct instructor as opposed to “just putting [the information] out there” as an interpreter. The student said that of her nine interpreters this year, she was happy that this educational interpreter and some others went beyond interpreting to help her understand and to encourage her.

Figure 10. Status of interpretation by role per activity.

All participants that were interviewed recognized that not all spoken discourse was being interpreted in the classroom. The science teacher estimated 75% of the class was interpreted, and the special education teacher estimated between 25% and 40% of all classroom discourse was interpreted. When the deaf student was asked how she felt about things not being interpreted, she indicated that she understood that the interpreter was just one person and would be incapable of interpreting for multiple speakers at the same time.

When asked about training they had received prior to working with an interpreter, the deaf student and both teachers said they had received none. Both teachers emphasized that teachers, in general, including special education teachers, get little to no education on how to work with deaf students, and so they relied on the educational interpreters’ expertise to make decisions regarding the deaf student and what the student and the interpreter wanted or needed.

The interpreter stated that her decisions were made on the basis of the level of understanding of the student and what the educational interpreter felt was most important moment to moment. In making these decisions, the educational interpreter said she focused mostly on making sure the student had the foundations of any lesson or concept. She would continue with a foundation topic until the student understood, even if the class had gone on to the next topic. She also strongly supported the student’s desire to complete independent work prior to receiving the answers, even if that put them off-sequence with the rest of the class.

The teachers were also asked about the accommodations they made to their classes in order to incorporate an interpreter and a deaf student. The primary item they mentioned was adjustment to the pace of the class: slowing down and allowing more wait time. Also, they would provide the deaf student with copies of the PowerPoint presentations to facilitate note-taking during class lectures. The science teacher talked about her efforts to make sure all videos had captions, in spite of difficulties finding captioned videos on course content. The special education teacher mentioned the need to be aware of the environment to make sure everyone could see without a “tennis match” effect of bouncing back and forth between the teacher or visual aid and the interpreter and to have eye contact in order to facilitate lipreading. The science teacher adjusted her own tolerance for noise in the classroom to encourage the student to use her voice during class. The student also took responsibility for her accommodations by adapting to understanding the manually coded English (MCE) system her interpreters used instead of her preferred language of American Sign Language (ASL).

An issue that was not specifically addressed in the interview but that surfaced from both the teachers involved concerns about a deaf student’s life after high school. A primary concern was dependence on the additional supports provided by the interpreter. Interpreters often “follow” one student from grade to grade, working not only as an interpreter, but also as a tutor and direct instructor. After years of this support, the students may not be prepared to enter the real world where these supports would not be available.

The special education teacher’s advice on defining the interpreter’s role started with a question: “What is your purpose of being there?” She felt that additional responsibilities and roles, such as direct instruction and teaching, are a personal issue. “I think [determining interpreter responsibilities] is the hardest thing for the interpreter to figure out. … I can’t tell you what your job is. I think it’s about where your heart lies, just like being a teacher.”

Discussion

Because an educational interpreter’s primary function in the classroom is communication access, anything that causes a loss of information between the teacher and the deaf student is an impact on that access. In this study, communication access appears to have been impacted by the interpreter filling multiple roles in the classroom, particularly the direct instructor role.

Roles

The interpreter in this study spent 41% of the class time in the role of the interpreter (Figure 4). More time was spent functioning as a direct instructor to the deaf student—helping her read worksheets and a quiz, walking her through thought processes to answer questions, and re-explaining class concepts—than was spent interpreting classroom discourse. During the independent work time, where a majority of the direct instruction occurred, the videos showed teachers clarifying student questions; students socializing; and academic, social, and language learning occurring among the other members of the classroom. The student was missing out on these opportunities because she was receiving more individual instruction during those times, from a person who is not certified as a teacher, as well as losing opportunities for working independently, similarly to what Shaw and Jamieson (1997) found. This interpreter was not asked or otherwise required to serve as a direct instructor to the student but felt compelled to because of the student’s perceived level of understanding.

So what should an educational interpreter’s role be in the classroom? Historically, interpreters have looked at their roles through models of job description: interpreter, tutor, consultant, and lists of tasks they would and would not perform, or as metaphors: helper, conduit, ally, and so on. Some recent models have been proposed that frame interpreting as a practice profession that may serve to guide educational interpreters in a better understanding of their “role space” in the overall educational system.

First, Llewellyn-Jones and Lee (2013) proposed a model of role space that views role not as a single position or set of tasks, but as a dynamic space interpreters inhabit through an ever-changing set of choices and decisions. With three axes, Presentation of Self (invisible to interactive), Participant Alignment (deaf to hearing), and Interaction Management (step in to hands off), these continuums are models of how interpreters decide to fulfill their duties in the course of the active communication event. Fitzmaurice (2017, 2018) advocates the use of this model for educational interpreters as a way to move away from role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload.

Second, the demand control schema (Dean & Pollard, 2013) guides interpreters in analyzing the circumstances surrounding the active communication event by asking them to evaluate four areas of demands—environmental, interpersonal, paralinguistic, and intrapersonal—and apply controls before, during, and after the event to address the demands. The demands lead them to examine the goals of the school environment; goals of the individuals, teachers, and students; challenges of the environment, including multiple visual demands and simultaneous communication; and realities of participants’ thought worlds, among others. What controls and how interpreters decide to use them to ameliorate these demands guide their decisions as applies to the circumstances of any particular situation.

Finally, systems thinking has been brought to the interpreting field, asking educational interpreters to look at the entire system in which they are working. The role is socially constructed by the people involved in the system, present or not, including administrators, teachers, interpreters, parents, and students. It is subject to the centralized hierarchy of the school system and is guided by the processes, procedures, policies, and practices inherent in that system as well as the field of interpreting (Fitzmaurice, 2018; Witter-Merithew, 2014). This model guides decisions as they adhere to the struc-ture inherent in the system.

Putting these three models together, we have decision-making during the active communication event (role space) guided by the circumstances of the event (demand control schema) framed in the structure of the entire system (systems thinking, Figure 11). Therefore, defining the role space of an interpreter in any educational situation must take into account the goals and expectations of administrators, teachers, and parents; the abilities of the interpreters; and the ages, needs, and abilities of the students (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001; Seal, 2004; Winston, 1998; Zawolkow & DeFiore, 1986). Applying these three models, interpreters are led to understand that their role space and the decisions made surrounding it are, and must be, a collaborative process involving the people, hierarchy, and processes of the system as well as the demands and controls available in that system.

Figure 11. Hierarchy of role space decision-making.

The educational interpreter is, by virtue of their position as a related service provider, a professional educational team member and a member of the educational system, as are teachers, speech language pathologists, and school counselors. Although their primary function may be to “facilitate communication,” in the educational setting, more may be required of the interpreter either through participants’ needs and expectations or through students’ needs, making the purpose more akin to “facilitating education.” The educational interpreter must apply the goals, principles, and practices of both interpreting and education to these demands to determine the appropriate role space they should inhabit for each situation. Ideally, other personnel would be assigned the noninterpreting duties; otherwise, a balance must be struck between providing the academic and language information a student needs to develop cognitively and providing the additional support to help a student through a lesson to avoid role overload. Knowing the importance of social communication in language development, and thus cognitive development (Hoff, 2009), the roles interpreters fill in the classroom, as well as the placement of the deaf student in an inclusion class, should be carefully examined.

Access

Over the course of the three days analyzed, only 36% of the 2,758 intervals were fully or partially interpreted (Figure 3), or, equivalently, only 82 min of nearly 4 hr of classroom discourse was interpreted. This number is consistent with Wolbers et al. (2012), who found “parallel interpreting” occurred 33% of the time in the classrooms they observed. Even if we take away the independent work time as being unrepresentative of the regular class routine, we still have only 58% of the lecture and 69% of discussion being fully interpreted, which aligns with the findings of Shaw and Jamieson (1997), who noted that their student participant had access to 60% of “class-directed instruction.” Of the entire observed time, 56% of all spoken discourse in the class was not interpreted. If administrators, teachers, parents, or deaf students are expecting equal access to classroom discourse by employing an interpreter, this study, among others, shows that this is not what is actually occurring in classrooms.

The simultaneous nature of classrooms and multiple people talking at the same time produce multiple demands that can lead to the need to prioritize the visual information the deaf student accesses (Smith, 2010; Winston, 2004). Unfortunately, the interpreter must make many of these priority decisions in the moment without consulting or informing either the student or the teacher. A systems approach to collaboratively building role space in which demands, and controls, have been discussed and agreed on can lead to better informed decision-making in the moment.

In this study, the educational interpreter said her primary consideration was the “understanding level of the student,” and so she focused on making sure the foundations of a lesson were understood. Decisions such as these rely on the educational interpreter’s understanding of professional, educational, and personal ethics, using a teleological approach to ethics to take into account the context of the situation and the potential outcomes (Dean & Pollard, 2006). For the educational interpreter, her decisions worked to further the student’s education, to the best of her ability, but without the knowledge of the teacher’s plans for the class. With this “unregulated autonomy” (Fitzmaurice, 2017), she assumed the direct instructor role more frequently than might be expected of a secondary-level interpreter.

A primary difference between this study and previous studies (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001; Shaw & Jamieson, 1997; Wolbers et al., 2012) is the grade level: a high school classroom and elementary classrooms, respectively. The educational interpreting literature proposes that there should be a reduction of additional interpreter responsibilities and an increase of student responsibilities as the student matures (Davino, 1985; Lawson & Hamrick, 2011; Zawolkow & DeFiore, 1986), moving toward an exclusively interpreting role in secondary settings; however, there is no empirical evidence for these theories. On the basis of the data for this study, this distribution shift does not appear to be occurring and may be a factor in the teachers’ concerns about the student’s success after high school.

The interpreter repeatedly referred to the student’s “level of understanding” and “frustration level” when discussing the need to provide direct instruction and felt the student benefited from these additional supports. This student was new to the process of interpreted education setting and lacked training or familiarity with the primary function of the interpreter. Additionally, world knowledge gaps and English difficulties related to her bilingual home background may impact her educational progress. We also know that many deaf students exhibit academic deficits and that the average reading level of a deaf adult is around the 6th grade level (McKee et al., 2015). With secondary texts far above their reading level and gaps in background knowledge, it is likely many deaf students need support beyond interpretation in and out of the classroom, even at the high school level. With a collaborative examination of these demands among the educational interpreter and teachers, different controls or solutions may have been available to allow both access to the curriculum and access to the discourse of the classroom.

Although many interpreter programs continue to teach that the interpreter should remain solely in the role of the interpreter, educational interpreters are finding that difficult to do when confronted with student needs. In addition, RID includes noninterpreting duties such as tutoring in their standard practice paper, as does the EIPA Guidelines of Professional Conduct for Educational Interpreters. Many interpreter job descriptions include tutoring as an assigned responsibility (Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, 2010; Schick, 2007). A more collaborative approach among all system stakeholders is suggested for defining the interpreter’s role space, bridging the education and interpreting fields and assessing student needs (Fitzmaurice, 2018; Lawson, 2012).

Implications

Students who are already language delayed suffer social and cognitive deficits that are only further impacted by having less access to communication from the classroom environment than their peers. Additionally, interpreters are not, for the most part, certified teachers, yet many are modifying and directly instructing students without direction from the classroom teacher or training in techniques for effective tutoring and teaching. The amount of information an educational interpreter learns about a student while interpreting is staggering, but without allotted collaboration time, much of it remains unshared with the educators who need that information.

Educational interpreters need to collaborate with teachers throughout the year regarding having a deaf student and an interpreter in their classroom. This should begin as an orientation providing information on interpreting, deaf education, and working together in the classroom. Interpreting topics might include issues of appropriate roles, lag time, turn-taking, multiple visual demands, and the funnel effect of having multiple speakers’ comments interpreted by one interpreter. The deaf education part should consist of information on language development, background knowledge gaps, principles for teaching deaf students, and content that is particularly challenging for deaf students such as phonics and poetry. Guidelines should include talking and interacting directly with the student, extending wait time after questions to provide an opportunity for the deaf student to answer, providing captioned videos, arranging for note-taking, providing lesson plans and materials, and interpreter placement logistics. Finally, an opportunity to begin collaboration should be provided to allow the teacher and the interpreter to discuss teacher and individualized education plan (IEP) goals, teaching style, and student needs and to negotiate the interpreter’s role. Ongoing collaboration that would address lesson plans and class materials as well as student progress is vital.

Interpreter programs that focus on community interpreting typically lack the time in their program to deal with the training and curricular needs of preservice educational interpreters. In addition to interpreting foundations, educational interpreters need specific emphasis on language development of deaf children and principles of education as well as consulting skills. They need the skills to advocate for themselves and their students by educating those with whom they work.

Limitations

Although this study aligns with other research, it is not generalizable because it looks only at one classroom with one interpreter and one deaf student. In addition, the selection of the setting did not occur through a randomized process. The study does, however, give us another snapshot of what is actually occurring in interpreted classrooms.

Although reliability was high between the raters, there is always room for improvement of a study in hindsight. The codes for the status of interpretation might have been clearer had they been reduced to interpreted, not interpreted, silence, and questionable. The partially interpreted classification could have been included with the interpreted classification without greatly impacting the results. In addition, it would have been preferable not to need a questionable classification for any category. Finally, this study focused on the more academic discourse of the class, specifically, the teachers’ discourse, to the almost total exclusion of social interaction among students.

Future Research

Further information is needed on the subject of educational interpreters, interpreted education, and duties interpreters take on in classrooms. This study examines how much of the classroom discourse is interpreted into sign language while filling multiple roles, but interpreters, educators, and families need additional information on how much of that interpreted information is actually received and understood by the student, particularly when multiple roles could potentially confuse the information. They need more generalizable information from a larger variety of interpreters, students, and educational settings in order to see true relationships between roles and communication access. Another topic for further inquiry is the decision-making process interpreters undergo when adjusting their role space, responding to demands, and choosing to perform additional duties. What ends are they trying to accomplish with the various roles, and could those ends be better served in other ways?

Ultimately, the study provides another peek into the classroom to see what interpreters are doing. It shows that multiple roles appear to impact deaf students’ access to classroom discourse and potentially erode the general quality of services deaf students receive. Given what we know about the importance of language access for cognitive development, an interpreter would, ideally, serve solely as an interpreter in the classroom, providing the deaf student with the same opportunity to “listen to” and “tune out” important and unimportant conversations, respectively, throughout the classroom, whereas instruction would be provided by licensed and qualified educators. Instead, educational interpreters, without teacher or tutor training, are stepping into the academic and background gaps. A decision must be made about the educational interpreter’s role: facilitate communication or facilitate education. In the former case, the inverted triangles model of diminishing interpreter responsibilities with student age proves to be a fallacy in many circumstances. In the latter case, interpreters need more training and direction from the teachers with whom they work in order to fill these roles.

References

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Davino, D. (1985, February). The roles and responsibilities of the educational interpreter [Presentation]. Orange County Department of Education Secondary Hearing Impaired Program staff meeting, University High School, Irvine, CA.

Dean, R. K., & Pollard, R. Q. (2005). Consumers and service effectiveness in interpreting work: A practice profession perspective. In M. Marschark, R. Peterson, & E. Winston (Eds.), Interpreting and interpreter education: Directions for research and practice (pp. 259–282). Oxford University Press.

Dean, R. K., & Pollard, R. Q. (2006). From best practice to best practice process: Shifting ethical thinking and teaching. In E. M. Maroney (Ed.), A new chapter in interpreter education: Accreditation, research and technology. CIT.

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