Students demonstrate remarkable critical thinking in undergraduate sign language interpreting

Dr. Mark Halley, University of North Florida assistant professor of ASL/English interpreting, and David Phillips, UNF alumni and former visiting faculty, recently published a peer-reviewed article in The Interpreters' Newsletter, the first academic journal in interpreting studies.

The findings revealed that despite exhibiting beginning-level American Sign Language proficiency, students demonstrated remarkable creativity and critical thinking abilities when it came to discourse and discourse analysis.

The paper explores strategy for teaching undergraduate American Sign Language/English interpreting students about discourse types and genre boundaries. The research shows that a critical approach to discourse analysis can guide students toward a deeper understanding of the sociocultural and contextual backgrounds in which they work.

Over the course of one semester, students were required to read a scholarly paper in the field of interpreting studies and create an American Sign Language video-recorded reformulation of the paper in a different discourse genre (e.g., a television news broadcast or a product infomercial). Throughout their research, Halley and Phillips focused on the students’ ability to critically analyze and synthesize the scholarly content and the duality of disfluency and discourse analysis during interpreter and translator training.

Read the results of “Discoursing ‘dis course: applying discourse analysis in an undergraduate signed language interpreting course” in The Interpreters’ Newsletter, or view the summary in ASL on YouTube.