Deaf refugee¹ and immigrant² students in the United States are often placed in mainstream settings with educational interpreters under the premise that the provision of an interpreter constitutes sufficient access to the educational environment and to learning. This practice occurs despite a lack of research on the needs of this student population, including how or whether educational interpreters can effectively support these students (Johnson et al., 2014). Deaf refugees and immigrants are not only unfamiliar with the U.S. school system, but also have linguistic and life experiences that are different from their United States-born deaf peers (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000a, 2000b; Guardino & Cannon, 2016; Pizzo, 2016; Willoughby, 2012). As such, the strategies that interpreters use to support these students, though potentially similar to those used with other deaf students, may be guided by different factors. There is a critical need for research to identify the strategies interpreters use to support deaf refugee and immigrant students and the underlying factors that guide interpreters to use particular strategies.

Although there are no statistics indicating how many of the deaf students in the United States who receive an interpreted education are refugees or immigrants, interpreters do report working with this population. Johnson et al. (2014) found that a vast majority of educational interpreters in the United States report serving students from other countries who “were language delayed and required different support systems than interpreters were trained to provide” (p. 69). The strategies educational interpreters use with any deaf student are uniquely impacted by the student’s linguistic needs. For deaf refugee and immigrant students, educational interpreter strategies are likely further compounded by the students’ unique educational needs, background experiences, and how they impact learning (see Akamatsu & Cole, 2000a, 2000b; Guardino & Cannon, 2016; Pizzo, 2016; Willoughby, 2012). Deaf refugees and immigrants may have limited access to signed and/or spoken languages, may have been exposed to multiple languages throughout their journey, and their families may use a language or languages other than English in the home (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b; Pizzo, 2016; Willoughby, 2012). As such, their language abilities will be unique, and their language learning will differ from that of other students (Guardino & Cannon, 2016; Pizzo, 2016). Additionally, deaf refugees and immigrants have unique background experiences compared with their peers, including hearing refugee and immigrant students and nonimmigrant and nonrefugee deaf students (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000a, 2000b). Such experiences include inconsistent, or no, formal education and a lack of family awareness regarding deafness and special education services available in their heritage country or the country of relocation (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b). These circumstances may be exacerbated for refugee children, whose families were under immediate oppression and/or persecution (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000a). These unique factors impact the strategies an interpreter uses with a deaf refugee or immigrant student.

Decision-Making in Interpreting

Interpreting, particularly in educational settings, requires a critical thinking process, in which interpreters make decisions and carefully consider a number of factors (Colonomos, 2015; Dean & Pollard, 2013; Gile, 2009; Leeson, 2005; Llewellyn-Jones & Lee, 2013; Seal, 2004; Smith, 2013). That decision-making process is of distinct importance for deaf students who work with educational interpreters, because it impacts their educational outcomes. Decision-making processes and the factors that impact them become even more critical when working with deaf refugee and immigrant students, a population for which interpreters have had little training (Johnson et al., 2014).

In addition (although often considered separate from decision-making), culture is an omnipresent factor, including shared norms and values, traditions and beliefs, and rules for behavior (Colonomos, 2015; Mindess, 2006). Interpreters must consider not only their own culture(s), but also those of the participants in interpreted interactions, as the work of interpreting is to build bridges between people of different languages, cultures, and thought-worlds (McKee & Davis, 2010). In multilingual, multiethnic interpreting situations, the interpreter must span wider gaps than simply those between Deaf and hearing cultures, requiring significant multicultural competence (McKee & Davis, 2010; National Multicultural Interpreter Project (NMIP), 2000). Multicultural competence includes knowledge of different cultural identities, of behaviors within cultural contexts, and of others’ perceptions of the world, as well as appropriate behaviors for working with other cultural groups and trust-building behaviors (Colonomos, 2015; NMIP, 2000). Having these competencies enables the interpreter to make an interpretation that is more culturally and linguistically accessible for all parties involved (Colonomos, 2015; NMIP, 2000). Multicultural competence, or a lack thereof, may impact the strategies educational interpreters use to support deaf refugee and immigrant students.

Research on Educational Interpreters

Considering that an educational interpreter may be the primary means a deaf refugee or immigrant student is provided with to access their education, it is important to acknowledge the context of educational interpreting. This context can illuminate how interpreters approach the work of educational interpreting, as well as the issues they face when working in educational settings. Interpreters working with deaf refugee and immigrant students are metaphorically in the dark, working despite a lack of research on educational interpreting as well as on how educational systems impact deaf refugees and immigrants. Existing research sheds light on the current understanding of educational interpreting, while also highlighting the gaps in our knowledge of how an interpreted education impacts deaf refugee and immigrant students.

Although demand for interpreters in educational settings has increased in the wake of sweeping disability laws, educational interpreters historically lack qualification (Seal, 2004; Smith, 2015; Winston, 2015). Unclear legal requirements regarding qualification have resulted in states following the letter of the law rather than using evidence-based practices and creating “backdoor” policies when qualifications cannot be met (Smith, 2015; Winston, 2015). Further, although interpreters increasingly have academic and professional credentials at the state and/or national level, most are still underqualified because of a lack of understanding of educational systems and how interpreters fit into these systems (Johnson et al., 2014). This lack of qualification ultimately impacts students’ educational outcomes. Deaf refugee and immigrant students are particularly impacted, because they need additional support to address their unique linguistic and educational abilities, challenges, and needs that interpreters are not trained to provide (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b; Johnson et al., 2014).

There remains a lack of clarity about the educational interpreter’s role (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001; Fitzmaurice, 2018; Russell & McLeod, 2009). The interpreter in a K–12 educational setting often enacts a role established by school systems and educators, who seek to fill perceived gaps in mainstream education despite little knowledge about interpreting or an interpreted education (Winston, 2015). With any given deaf student, the interpreter is expected to fill linguistic and world knowledge gaps in the student’s education as well as to become one of the only people who provide the student with direct communication (Winston, 2015). Such interpreters become de facto language models (Monikowski, 2004; Winston, 2015). Interpreters are also often assigned or take on duties in addition to interpreting, such as assessing and responding to the deaf students’ needs and abilities, keeping teachers informed of the deaf students’ progress, tutoring the deaf students, monitoring behavior, and providing general classroom assistance (Antia & Kreimeyer, 2001; Jones et al., 1997; Smith, 2013; Winston, 2015). The unique linguistic and lived experiences of deaf refugee and immigrant students may exacerbate linguistic and world knowledge gaps, which are already common in deaf students’ education, such that the interpreter works to fill more and larger gaps by taking on additional responsibilities without the necessary knowledge or training to do so (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b; Johnson et al., 2014).

Studying educational interpreting through the lens of decision-making can illuminate the factors underlying interpreters’ chosen strategies. Interpreters focus on a variety of factors when working with deaf students in educational settings, including visual access; the student’s language use, preferences, and learning; social and academic inclusion; and teacher intent (Russell & Winston, 2014; Smith, 2013). Interpreters working with deaf refugee and immigrant students will need to focus not only on these factors, which impact all deaf students, but also on those that apply specifically to the students owing to their experiences as refugees and immigrants. These factors include their linguistic foundations, abilities, and needs as well as their background and world knowledge levels. Such factors are uniquely formed through the refugee or immigrant experience and will impact the strategies interpreters choose when working with them (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000a, 2000b; Guardino & Cannon, 2016; Pizzo, 2016; Willoughby, 2012).

Language Deprivation and Student Outcomes

Students access education through language, which is a tool for development, learning, and interaction (Boys Town National Research Hospital, n.d.). In the United States, many deaf children do not have access to their families’ spoken language(s), nor do families often know ASL; thus, these children do not acquire a language from birth (Skotara et al., 2012). Deaf children who do not acquire language early in life suffer linguistically, particularly in gaining language fluency, as well as in other developmental areas (Henner et al., 2016; Humphries et al., 2012; Marschark, 2007; Marschark et al., 2002; Skotara et al., 2012). There is a short time window during which language can be successfully acquired, which ends at or around 5 years of age; a child who has not acquired a language by this age may never acquire nativelike fluency in any language, becoming linguistically deprived (Humphries et al., 2012). Although this rarely occurs with hearing children, it is significantly more common with deaf children (Humphries et al., 2012; Skotara et al., 2012). Immigrant and refugee families often have delayed awareness of a child’s deafness, resulting in the child having additionally delayed access to and acquisition of language (Guardino & Cannon, 2016). Exposure and varying levels of access to multiple spoken languages, as well as a lack of exposure to sign languages, is common for these children (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b; Pizzo, 2016). Even when a family has settled in a new country, issues such as poverty, location, and documentation status may prevent a family and their child from accessing spoken or sign language courses (Pizzo, 2016). These compounding factors often result in a deaf refugee or immigrant child being significantly linguistically delayed as well as deprived.

Issues related to students’ language acquisition and their academic outcomes only increase with the addition of an interpreter. Deaf children in the United States who experience an interpreted education may appear to be included in the classroom but face a number of barriers including their own lack of linguistic ability, unqualified interpreters, and a lack of full access to their learning environment (Boys Town National Research Hospital, n.d.; Henner et al., 2016; Humphries et al., 2012; Marschark, 2007; Marschark et al., 2002; Russell, 2007, as cited in Russell & McLeod, 2009; Seal, 2004; Skotara et al., 2012; Smith, 2015; Winston, 2015). Despite these significant barriers, deaf children are expected to learn classroom content as well as language through an interpreter (Monikowski, 2004, as cited in Winston, 2015). Deaf refugee and immigrant students who are expected to learn through interpretation face an even greater burden than their U.S.-born deaf peers, as they lack not only linguistic foundations, but also the necessary cultural and world knowledge to learn through an interpreter in a U.S. school setting (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b).

Academic success for deaf students in mainstream settings is best achieved when schools offer sufficient support services and are knowledgeable about the needs of a deaf child (Marschark, 2007). Factors relating to the family, the school, or the child, as well as the support the child receives both in the home and at school, each impact a deaf student’s academic success (Marschark, 2007; Reed et al., 2008). Deaf refugee and immigrant students, in particular, may need additional or different supports to succeed academically as a result of their unique circumstances. As access to academics occurs through language, teachers working with deaf refugee and immigrant students often must simultaneously teach language skills and content (Guardino & Cannon, 2016). Such language instruction, as well as providing opportunities for these students to use language expressively, helps them develop linguistically and academically (Pizzo, 2016). As the student begins to develop academically, however, they may be held to unrealistic expectations about their academic performance when considering their language foundations in comparison with their same-age peers (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b).

Another area in which deaf students, especially those who communicate through educational interpreters, experience difficulties is social interactions in mainstream educational environments. Although deaf students may fall within normal ranges for social behaviors (Antia et al., 2011), many struggle socially, especially with the presence of an interpreter, feeling limited or isolated in interpreted social interactions (Kurz & Langer (2004); Kluwin & Stinson, 1993, as cited in Marschark, 2007; Russell & McLeod, 2009). Educational interpreters are often of different racial and/or ethnic backgrounds and genders than the deaf students; this experience “can be awkward at best, and oppressive at worst” (Winston, 2015, p. 6). A lack of multicultural competence on the part of the interpreter may exacerbate the already limiting experience of socializing through an interpreter (NMIP, 2000). Deaf refugee and immigrant students may experience this isolation more intensely, because their access to socializing may be limited by language deprivation and a lack of social or world knowledge appropriate to their new environment.

Methodology

Study Design

This study gathered data about the strategies educational interpreters reported using to support deaf refugee and immigrant students in K–12 educational settings, as well as the underlying factors that guided the interpreters to use these strategies. Participants were recruited through an online posting of a survey asking for initial demographic data to ensure eligibility for the study. Potential participants were asked a series of demographic questions and whether they worked with a deaf student who had moved to the United States as a refugee or immigrant within 5 years as of the time of the study. Individual, semistructured interviews were set up with participants who were determined to be eligible through their survey responses. Participants were interviewed in English using videoconferencing software and were asked about the various aspects of serving deaf refugee and immigrant students.

Participants

Four participants were interviewed for this pilot study, and they met the following eligibility criteria: (a) working at the time of interview as a K–12 educational interpreter; (b) having 3 or more years of experience as a hearing English/sign language interpreter; (c) having 1 or more years of experience interpreting in K–12 educational settings; and (d) working with deaf student(s) who were immigrants or refugees to the United States within the 5 years prior to the time of the study. Each participant chose their own pseudonym for use throughout this study. The following pseudonyms will be used: Ester, Geri, Sarah, and Whetstone.³ Each interpreter’s certification(s) and years of interpreting experience can be found in Table 1.

Table 1. Participant Certification and Experience

Note. A:EI = Authorization: Educational Interpreter; CI = Certificate of Interpretation; CT = Certificate of Transliteration; EIPA = Educational Interpreter Performance Assessment; NIC = National Interpreter Certification.

a. Participants are identified by a self-selected pseudonym, b. State of Kentucky—state-issued temporary license, c. State of Colorado—state-issued educational interpreting authorization.

Data Collection

Data from interviews was transcribed into written English, including notations for pauses, filler words, false starts, repetitions, and emphasis (see Appendix). Instances when the participant signed while, or instead of, talking were included in the transcription (see Appendix). The videos and transcripts were then analyzed using NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software (QSR International, 2018), which revealed commonalities in interpreter strategies as well as in the factors underlying their decisions to use particular strategies. Although the strategies educational interpreters used with these students may be similar to those used with nonrefugee or and nonimmigrant deaf students, findings show that the strategies were chosen to address factors unique to the linguistic and lived experiences of deaf refugee and immigrant students.

Findings

All four interpreters reported using two main types of strategies in their work with deaf refugee and immigrant students: modifying their expressive language and facilitating students’ acclimation. Modifying their expressive language included the following strategies: using highly visual and gestural communication, using visual aids to support their language use, and contextualizing information. Facilitating students’ acclimation included supporting their acclimation to the school system or classroom as well as their acclimation to the United States more generally. Although many of these strategies may be similar to those used with nonrefugee and nonimmigrant deaf students, the interpreters’ explanations for choosing those particular strategies show that they considered factors in their decision-making processes that were unique to deaf refugee and immigrant students. Interpreters employed these strategies with the goal of improving students’ linguistic, academic, social, and emotional outcomes.

Modifying Interpreter Language Use

Two major factors included student language foundations and student background or world knowledge, and educational interpreters modified their own language use to address these factors. As is common with deaf refugee and immigrant students, the interpreters perceived the students as linguistically deprived and lacking in world knowledge, noting that they “didn’t come with a lot of language” or had “only home signs and no schooling” (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000a, 2000b; Henner et al., 2016; Humphries et al., 2012; Marschark, 2007; Marschark et al., 2002; Skotara et al., 2012). Interpreters altered their expressive language in a variety of ways in response to these factors. They increased the visual and gestural nature of their language, for instance, by using highly iconic signs and classifiers rather than formal ASL signs. They employed visual aids, including pictures, drawings, and classroom resources, to support their expressive language. The interpreters also contextualized information, making connections and providing context where they perceived gaps in students’ understanding. These strategies are similar to those an educational interpreter may use when working with any given deaf student and may be used to address a variety of factors. However, as the factors contributing to the language deprivation and world knowledge gaps of deaf refugee and immigrant children are unique, concern for the students’ linguistic and knowledge foundations was a primary factor for these interpreters (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000a, 2000b; Guardino & Cannon, 2016; Pizzo, 2016).

Using Highly Visual and Gestural Communication

All four interpreters increased the visual nature of their language use, such as international signs and more gesturelike communication. They also included more iconic signs, used classifiers rather than formal ASL signs, gestured or acted out to convey visual aspects of concepts, and emphasized their facial expressions to give visual cues. Geri used classifiers as opposed to formal ASL signs for concepts such as “walk.” This type of articulation is much more visual for deaf refugee and immigrant students. Whetstone described her signing with these students as “completely visual,” using international signs and gestures rather than formal ASL. Sarah gestured, acted out ideas, and used classifiers to help students gain an initial understanding of a given lesson. Ester also used an international style of signing, including more gestural or iconic signs that may be understood across sign languages. This signing style may be more readily understood by a deaf refugee or immigrant student, especially one who is familiar with using gestures to communicate or who has been exposed to sign languages other than ASL.

In addition to using gestural language and classifiers, Geri used her facial expression to indicate visual cues to the student, such as furrowed eyebrows when the teacher was managing the classroom. These cues, if understood, indicate visually that the teacher is talking, as well as that the teacher is talking in a manner that is serious or stern. However, Whetstone cautioned that the use of emphatic facial expression can negatively impact students, for instance, by causing fear rather than improving understanding. This may be especially true of deaf refugee and immigrant students, as many grow up with limited or no access to language and its accompanying facial cues (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b; Pizzo, 2016). The use of emphatic facial expression is thus a strategy that is highly individual to the student and must be approached with care.

Both Sarah and Whetstone noted that the increased use of visual language can happen at the expense of interpreting more detailed content, such as vocabulary items. Initially, interpreters use language that emphasizes visual elements, including iconic signs and classifiers, gestures, and even the acting out of actions or ideas, but intentionally leaves out complex ideas, vocabulary, and large fingerspelled words. Using such visual language can help a student grasp concepts, as Sarah noted, enabling them to participate in the lesson with the teacher and their classmates despite gaps in their language foundations. However, in the process, the student may be missing key vocabulary or content items. This strategy must therefore be used judiciously with an awareness of students’ linguistic abilities. As students are in school longer and gain a stronger language foundation, more complex concepts, vocabulary items, and larger fingerspelled words can be incorporated, while visuals such as gesturing and acting out can be reduced.

The interpreters’ descriptions of using classifiers, gestures, and international signing styles indicate that while the strategies used may be similar to those used with any other deaf student, the factors involved in the use of these strategies were unique to these students as deaf refugees and immigrants. The students’ linguistic deprivation, which is uniquely connected to their linguistic, educational, and background experiences as immigrants and refugees, remained a major factor in the interpreters’ decisions to use highly visual and gestural language. Increasing the visual nature of the interpreter’s language can foster a deaf refugee or immigrant student’s language acquisition. As the student acquires language, their increased linguistic access becomes a gateway to understanding more classroom content, improving the student’s academic outcomes, as well as allowing them to interact with the teacher and with other students, bettering their social outcomes.

Using Visual Aids to Support Language

Three of four interpreters employed visual aids, including showing students pictures, drawing with students, and using classroom resources, to support their expressive language or to stand in the place of language when the interpreter perceived that the child had foundational linguistic gaps. Those linguistic gaps, as well as how the students’ language foundations were impacted by their experiences as refugees and immigrants, remained major factors in the interpreters’ decisions to use these strategies.

Three interpreters used pictures on electronic devices as a strategy to bridge linguistic gaps between themselves and the students. Geri used pictures to ask students if they had seen an item or a place before, using the visual aid to establish concepts as well as to assess the students’ familiarity with those concepts. Interpreters paired pictures with specific signs to increase the student’s ability to communicate about classroom topics, developing the student’s vocabulary as well as their comprehension. Using this strategy can be beneficial not only because students build linguistic foundations, but also because they have an increased ability to participate in classroom discourse. Although this strategy may be beneficial with any deaf student, one interpreter noted that it is particularly helpful for interpreters working with deaf refugee and immigrant students, because the interpreter and student are less likely to share similar mental schemas. Pictures can bridge linguistic, experiential, and cultural gaps between those who are refugees or immigrants and those who are not, because the interpreter and the student are able to show one another items, places, and activities with which the other person is unfamiliar. Using pictures to facilitate communication can thus help an interpreter and a student navigate cultural and linguistic barriers, serving as the foundation for a shared understanding between them (NMIP, 2000).

To create visual aids for deaf refugee and immigrant students, Sarah and Geri drew pictures. Geri took turns with a student, communicating by drawing on a desk that had been painted with whiteboard paint. She noted that this strategy was particularly helpful for deaf refugees and immigrants with language deprivation, stating, “[W]hether or not students have language, they can draw, they-they can hold a pencil, they can … even stick figures are better than nothing.” As deaf refugee and immigrant students are likely to arrive at school in the United States without a first language, and past the age of the language acquisition threshold, engaging them in activities such as drawing may be an effective way to establish basic communication (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b; Humphries et al., 2012).

Two interpreters used classroom resources as visual aids while communicating with deaf refugee and immigrant students. Sarah used classroom handouts to increase students’ vocabulary by linking written words with signs or classifiers. This strategy can increase vocabulary recognition of written English, expand the student’s vocabulary in ASL, and demonstrate connections and differences between English and ASL. These skills, particularly understanding how English functions, are important precursors to English literacy, a skill that deaf refugee and immigrant students experience more difficulty in acquiring than do native-born deaf children (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b). Such a focus on the visual aid, however, may take the student’s time and visual attention away from other learning occurring in the classroom. The benefits of using the classroom resource must be weighed against the learning opportunities the student will inevitably miss as a result of attending to the visual aid.

Interpreters approached this strategy from a perspective of concern for the students’ language foundations. Sarah used pictures to find “any way to bring it to them so they can see it,” placing the linguistic needs of the deaf refugee or immigrant student first. The interpreters focused on the students’ perceived lack of language foundations, using visual aids such as classroom resources to help them learn signs and written words for vocabulary items. Visual aids such as pictures and drawing also facilitated interactions between the interpreters and the students, overcoming cultural barriers to communication. It is important to note, however, that using visual aids may be at the expense of interpreting, particularly for deaf refugee and immigrant students with minimal language foundations. Such students may initially benefit more from having direct interactions with the interpreter, in which visual aids facilitate those interactions and help the student to develop the language foundations necessary for participation in classroom discourse and activities. As these foundations develop, the student may require visual aids less frequently or for shorter periods, allowing the interpreter to minimize their use.

Contextualizing Information

Three interpreters contextualized information in response to gaps in the students’ background and world knowledge as well as in their language foundations. Contextualization, a naturally occurring feature of discourse, is a strategy for managing nonshared knowledge among parties in an interaction (Janzen & Shaffer, 2008). Interactions become coherent through contextualization, when participants in the interactions provide additional background or descriptive information necessary for a statement to fully make sense (Janzen & Shaffer, 2008). Ester described contextualization as “making the connection” between ASL and English, asking students “to apply information,” what information meant, and “scaffolding back and forth, so they can make the connection.” Interpreters’ perceptions that the students lacked the language foundations or background knowledge necessary to understand given concepts remained major factors in their decision to use this strategy.

Although contextualization is used in many interactions and can be employed as a strategy with any given deaf student, interpreters working with deaf refugee and immigrant students may resort to its use in order to address unique factors. Ester noted that these students often have linguistic and experiential gaps, asserting that they are “extremely fragmented, so they just see part. They see part. They cannot see the whole picture.” Contextualizing reduces this fragmentation and includes information that can guide a student toward a more complete understanding. Whetstone described contextualizing as one of the most challenging aspects of working with deaf and refugee students, because it stems from the need to explain concepts that the student has not yet encountered or does not understand. Whetstone noted that while this strategy is also used with nonimmigrant and nonrefugee deaf students, it “happens more frequently with a deaf refugee [or immigrant] student just because they don’t have the same background knowledge that other students have in the classroom.” These gaps in students’ background and world knowledge, particularly in comparison with their peers, were major factors in her decision to contextualize information.

Contextualization is unique to each interaction, and, as such, this building of additional information and ensuring of coherence can occur in many ways. Sarah prefaced her contextualizing by first breaking down concepts, making them simpler both linguistically and conceptually to help students gain an understanding of the content. As the students understood ideas, she contextualized to further explain and to rebuild the concepts she had broken down. Ester contextualized to build the students’ ASL and English skills by noting differences between ASL and English, including background information about how the languages functioned, and asking students to apply concepts in their own communication. She described contextualizing as a necessary strategy not only to help students understand ideas but also to facilitate their acquisition of language. Ester assumed responsibility for contextualizing with the purpose of teaching linguistic skills, grounding her interactions with students in her “ideal of them having a language for the future.”

The choices interpreters made when contextualizing were laden with decision-making factors. They expressed concern about what information to share and how to share it with deaf refugee and immigrant students. Whetstone noted the conflict between contextualizing and interpreting, because contextualizing can require a significant time commitment and may come at the expense of interpreting. In such cases, interpreters must carefully choose what information to contextualize and how to do so. Interpreters also had to deal with the gaps they perceived in the students’ knowledge and linguistic foundations. Contextualizing information is one strategy for filling such gaps, and, because it is used frequently in interactions, may be used with any student. However, the linguistic and world knowledge disparities faced by deaf refugee and immigrant children are often more significant than those faced by other deaf children (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b). Interpreters may hence assume a de facto responsibility for addressing these factors and for filling linguistic and knowledge gaps, contextualizing more frequently or to a greater extent with these students (Winston, 2015).

Facilitating Student Acclimation

Interpreters’ observations about students’ background experiences and knowledge, as well as their cultural perceptions, significantly influenced their decision to support students’ acclimation. Sarah noted that the students, as is common for deaf refugees and immigrants, did not know “how to do school. They did not go to school in their home country, or if they did it was spotty” (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b). Although any deaf student may need to become acclimated to their school and to hearing culture, deaf refugee and immigrant students have unique experiential factors, including past educational experiences, or lack thereof, and cultural perceptions as refugees or immigrants to the United States. As such, they will require different supports than a U.S.-born deaf student to become acclimated to their life in a new school system and a new country (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b). Interpreters supported students’ acclimation, focusing on their background knowledge and cultural perceptions, with several goals in mind. These included preparing the students for learning language, learning academic concepts, improving linguistic skills, and improving academic outcomes. They also sought to ensure that the students were aware of appropriate behaviors in school and with their peers, fostering social success, and discussed cultural perceptions, recognizing students’ cultures and emotions to foster emotional growth.

Supporting Acclimation to the School System

All four interpreters supported students in becoming acclimated to their new school environment. Sarah explained not only classroom expectations to students, such as staying in one’s seat for a certain period and writing down information, but also more basic school concepts such as letters and numbers. Such explanations can support young native-born deaf children’s acclimation when they first enter school during an early childhood or elementary school program. However, immigrant and refugee students may need this support at later ages, particularly if they have had little exposure to formal schooling (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b). Further, they may arrive at this later age still unfamiliar with English lettering systems or with common features of U.S. schooling such as homework and tests, requiring more support to acclimate to the school setting than a United States-born deaf student. Ester helped students acclimate to the use of English, particularly context clues, in the school setting. She used her prior experience to anticipate problem areas in English texts, working with students to foster their understanding in those areas. Geri, instead, focused on social skills, supporting students’ acclimation to the school environment by encouraging what she considered age-appropriate social behavior. She explained to a middle school student who brought toys to class that school was a time for working and learning, as the other students were doing. She encouraged the student to engage in social behaviors similar to his peers. However, while her decision may have fostered the student’s acclimation to the classroom and to social situations with his peers, it may have closed opportunities for him to learn language and concepts through play. Both the positive and the negative impacts of such decisions on deaf refugee and immigrant students must be considered.

Acclimating students to the school environment may sometimes be done at the expense of interpreting. Sarah asserted that students would be unable to access or learn content, because either they were not yet adequately acclimated to the environment or they did not yet have sufficient language foundations to communicate their basic needs. Although this may initially be true for any deaf student, such circumstances may be exacerbated for deaf refugee or immigrant students, who may be entering school for the first time at a much later age than U.S.-born deaf students (Akamatsu & Cole, 2000b). Although cultural acclimation may occur at the expense of interpreting, the amount of cultural acclimation a student needs changes over time. Whetstone noted that as they become acclimated, these students are increasingly able to communicate their needs and advocate for themselves, and the interpreter’s involvement in acclimating the student lessens.

Supporting Acclimation to the United States

One interpreter also supported students’ cultural acclimation to the United States in general, a strategy unique to working with students who are deaf refugees or immigrants. Ester’s awareness of the students’ cultural perceptions and of their lack of background knowledge about the United States led her to employ this strategy. Ester supported students’ cultural acclimation through conversations, answering students’ questions, and discussing cultural perceptions common in the United States. She explained that the students had connections to their heritage culture through their family and friends but that they could not ask their families or friends questions about culture or about being in the United States owing to a lack of shared language. Ester responded to the students’ need for answers, helping them to understand cultural differences and to acclimate to their new environment, through conversations. She stated that conversations are a powerful means of giving students not only insight and understanding about the world, but also the ability to make connections between themselves and the world, building thinking skills of a higher order.

Ester noted that although students carried their own cultural perceptions, they lacked background knowledge of and struggled to understand prevalent cultural perceptions in the United States. She provided an example of the deaf Mexican immigrant students with whom she worked asking her about U.S. news reports regarding Mexico. She emphasized the students’ difficulty in understanding the U.S. media’s depiction of Mexicans, noting that they could not believe the reports were about their own people, “because they don’t feel that they are bad. They don’t feel that their parents are bad, and why is it that people have this view of Mexicans? What’s wrong with being a Mexican person?” Ester had the multicultural competence to recognize the students’ culture(s), as well as their difficulty with understanding the new culture into which they were being immersed (NMIP, 2000). She perceived them to be missing background information about how Mexico is portrayed in mainstream U.S. media, as well as how this portrayal differed from their own perceptions of Mexican culture and people. She addressed these missing pieces through conversation, discussing the students’ cultural perceptions as well as those espoused by U.S. media outlets. Such conversations are unique to deaf students who are refugees or immigrants and can significantly support a student’s acclimation not only to their new school environment, but also to the country in which their family has settled. Further, such support can help students to feel validated while facilitating their understanding of other cultural perspectives.

Limitations

One limitation of this study is the sample size of four participants. This is due in part to the transient nature of immigrant and refugee families, who may not be at their final destination, only placing their children at a given school for a short time (Faltis & Valdés, 2010). Therefore, the criterion that interpreters must work “currently” with deaf refugee or immigrant students may have been a limiting factor on the participant pool. This study also contains bias in that transcripts of interviews, rather than the interview videos themselves, were analyzed and used. Although linguistic features present in the interviews were recorded as the researcher observed them, there is inherent bias in what each researcher is inclined to observe; hence, while a transcription facilitates the publication of research conducted through interviews, it is not a substitute for a participant’s actual interview comments. It is also critical that this research be understood as filtered through the lenses of the interpreters interviewed. The interviews do not show interpreters’ actual work; rather, they are interpreters’ self-reported observations. Interpreters’ perceptions about their work may be different from those of others, and, most importantly, from those of the students these interpreters serve.

Future Research

A multitude of opportunities exist for further research on educational interpreters’ work to support deaf refugee and immigrant students. The strategies found in this study can be explored further to ascertain whether they constitute patterns among educational interpreters working with deaf refugee and immigrant students. Future research must also include observation of interpreters’ work with deaf refugee and immigrant students to determine whether interpreters accurately report the strategies they use (see Russell & Winston, 2014; Smith, 2013). Such research can capture the current practices of educational interpreters working with deaf refugee and immigrant students.

Interpreters’ perspectives on their work are another area for further exploration. The interpreters in this study rarely noted using a strategy from the perspective of their needs or preferences for the interpretation. Rather, they focused on the interaction as a whole and specifically on the needs and abilities of the deaf refugee and immigrant students, tailoring their interpretations and interactions to support the students in the classroom. Further research can illuminate the impacts of a focus on the deaf refugee or immigrant student and the overall interaction versus that on the interpretation as a primarily linguistic event.

It would also be critical to include the perspectives of the students in future research. Deaf refugee and immigrant students are significantly impacted by the work of the interpreters who serve them and have unique experiences, challenges, and abilities that must be better understood. The strategies that interpreters use with these students must be studied through the lens of the students themselves, because their understanding of what interpreters are doing as part of their work or of how interpreters can effectively support them in educational settings may be vastly different than that of others.

Finally, research on the practices of interpreters in these settings must become the springboard to research on the efficacy of these practices. Although it is important to understand how educational interpreters work to support deaf refugee and immigrant students, the full benefits of this knowledge will be available only when it is clear that such practices do improve student outcomes. At present, deaf students across the United States, including refugees and immigrants, are enduring an interpreted education without research to support its efficacy. Researching the impacts of interpreters’ strategies on deaf refugee and immigrant students, as well as the underlying reasons for their use of these strategies, is of critical importance. Such research can illuminate these students’ unique needs, as well as indicating how or whether interpreters can effectively support students who receive an interpreted education. It is only through such research that we can identify a set of best practices for working in educational settings with deaf refugee and immigrant students.

Summary

This chapter explores strategies that educational interpreters in K–12 settings employed in their work with deaf refugee and immigrant students. Interpreters modified their expressive language use with students, concentrating not on creating the interpretation as a linguistic event, but on mitigating gaps in students’ language and knowledge foundations. They applied several strategies to modify their own language use, including using highly visual and gestural signs, using visual aids as language supports, and contextualizing information. Interpreters also employed strategies to support students’ cultural acclimation, recognizing the students’ unique position as new not only to a given school, but also to the school structure as a whole and to the operation of day-to-day life in the United States. Interpreters supported students’ acclimation by explaining classroom and social expectations, describing how English functions, and having conversations with students on cultural perceptions.

Given the number and magnitude of factors that interpreters working with deaf refugee and immigrant students seek to address, the strategies employed by interpreters cannot be understood in a vacuum. Rather, they represent the visible manifestations of work that was guided and impacted by significant decision-making factors. Among the prevalent factors were the students’ language foundations and their background knowledge or experiences, which were known to be unique to the lived experiences of deaf refugee and immigrant children. The nature of the linguistic deprivation faced by deaf refugee and immigrant students, as well as the gaps in their world knowledge, is such that they may need considerably more support at significantly later ages than deaf students born in the United States. Additionally, although any deaf student may need to acclimate to the school environment or to the use of English in their school day, the gaps in schooling and lack of formal education that deaf refugees and immigrants receive, compounded by the linguistic challenge of communicating with their families or with school staff to ask questions and learn about the world, create unique cultural and world knowledge barriers for these students. Thus, although many of these strategies could be used with any given deaf student, they were employed by interpreters to address challenges, needs, and abilities peculiar to deaf refugee and immigrant students.

It is important to recognize that these strategies were, at times, employed at the expense of interpreting or of other occurrences in the classroom. The interpreters directed their strategies toward mitigating perceived gaps so that the deaf refugee or immigrant student could participate in the ongoing interaction of the classroom. They weighed the benefits of using a given strategy against missing opportunities, including learning vocabulary items, being exposed to more detailed information or content, and attending to other visual aids or occurrences in the classroom. This process calls for significant decision-making skills, in which the interpreter—who is likely already interpreting—simultaneously chooses a strategy to mitigate linguistic or knowledge gaps and determines whether the strategy is worth using at the expense of interpreting or of other classroom occurrences.

The strategies interpreters employed show their direct attempts to use communication to achieve the goal of improved outcomes for deaf refugee and immigrant students. The interpreters sought to improve student outcomes in four key areas: linguistic, academic, social, and emotional. They worked toward the primary goal of improving the students’ linguistic outcomes, considering academic, social, and emotional outcomes as secondary outcomes hinging, at least in part, on linguistic success. Interpreters integrated the goal of improved language outcomes with their use of each strategy, noting their concern that students must not only understand a given concept or sign in the moment, but also gain language foundations for their futures. They seized opportunities to facilitate the students’ linguistic development, from words on a classroom handout to private conversations about news segments. Given that language learning and content learning are interconnected, interpreters also fostered linguistic development to improve students’ academic outcomes. They showed students pictures to facilitate understanding of classroom content, included gestures and highly iconic signs in their language to facilitate students’ comprehension, and contextualized information to describe concepts with which students were unfamiliar. They also supported students in their acclimation to the school environment itself, by explaining the use of numbers and letters, as well as larger vocabulary items and English usage in the classroom.

As social and emotional outcomes also relate to a student’s ability to understand others and to express themselves, the interpreters’ focus on students’ linguistic foundations also led to the goal of improving students’ social and emotional outcomes. Interpreters worked to foster students’ participation in the academic and social aspects of the classroom environment, including facilitating students’ abilities to discuss classroom topics with the teacher or other students and teaching social expectations for interacting with the students’ peers. They also expressed a concern for students to be able to communicate their basic needs and wants, and to be able to understand the world in a way that was meaningful to them. Interpreters used linguistic and cultural acclimation strategies to facilitate students’ communication about their own needs, experiences, and wants, as well as about their emotions and cultural perceptions.

The interconnected nature of the goals conceived by interpreters for deaf refugee and immigrant students shows the complexity of the work interpreters do to support these students. Although questions remain about whether interpreters should be responsible for supporting students in these ways, it is clear that interpreters are doing this work largely without the support of any research or guidance. In the absence of these supports, interpreters are guided by the factors that present themselves through their work with students. These factors, particularly relating to students’ language and world knowledge foundations, are unique to deaf refugee and immigrant students. Interpreters are thus engaged in a unique kind of work, using familiar strategies in new ways or for different reasons to support this exceptional student population.

Notes

1.A refugee is a person who has escaped a particular country, fleeing some kind of danger, oppression, or persecution (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-b).

2.An immigrant is a person who has come to a country with the intent of living there (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-a).

3.It should be noted that two interpreters, Geri and Sarah, were working at the same school at the time of the study.

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Appendix

Transcription Key With Examples

a. First word is often cut off by the interviewee, as shown by shortening of the word “it’s” in this example.

b If sign is conventionally done with two hands, but interviewee uses only one hand, this is indicated by (1 h).