Language myths of an interpreted educationA
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Detalles
A basic tenet of language acquisition is that children must have interactive access to direct language in daily use in order to acquire it. Interpreting in the K-12 classroom is not an interactive process. Neither the interpreter nor the deaf student has the freedom to play, practice, and independently impact the teacher’s language during an interpretation. It is most often the teacher in K-12 who initiates and controls the interactions, while using an intermediary to fill in the language. Instead of gradually acquiring language and interaction skills as most language users do, from prolonged interaction with native users, deaf children are placed in front of moving hands without the benefit of interaction. They are expected, by staring at these moving hands, to somehow decipher the meaning and internalise the structure and communication requirements of a language from watching an interpretation. I offer the following example to paint some slight sense of the absurdity of this expectation