Videos

Educational interpreters are called upon to interpret physical education classes, team sports and classroom content that may include sporting events. The setting for these events is extremely varied, including the classroom, gymnasium, athletic fields, swimming pools and stadiums. To provide quality interpretations that meet the needs of the student athletes who are deaf or hard of hearing, knowing the sign vocabulary associated with that sport is not enough. Setting up the plays, defense, offense and strategies is vital to provide access to the information and to enable the student to participate and perform to the best of her ability and potential. Participants will discuss and practice not only the vocabulary associated with sports, but also the discourse structures that may be used by the PE teacher or coach.

Many Communication Plans state the student who is deaf or hard of hearing utilizes Pidgin Sign English (PSE) as their primary mode of receptive communication. PSE is rich and complex, and is often used in complicated communication environments including elementary, middle, high schools and college level classrooms. Educational interpreters must analyze content and materials to be used in order to order to predict the variety of discourse structures that a teacher might use in a given lesson. This “hands-on” workshop will provide participants with examples of high quality effective interpretations presented in PSE in the educational setting, as well as, opportunities to interpret similar classroom content using PSE.

This module is one of a ten part series with Kevin Williams, produced by PaTTAN. Our ability to think as well as to acquire and learn language is largely dependent on patterns, contrasts and constraints. Much like being adrift on a vast ocean, language, without these features, causes listeners to be awash in a sea of confusion, until some form ‘life ring’ is made available to use to take us to firmer foundation. This workshop will focus on prosodic features of language which provide such critical information.

This module is one of a ten part series by Kevin Williams, produced by PaTTAN. Good writers write usually have some form of an outline or discourse structure to guide their writing. Educational discourse is much the same. While most educational interpreters may not have the actual outline of lesson instruction, it is essential that they create a visual scaffold on which to build their interpretation. This workshop will define the notion of discourse mapping and linguistic features frequently used to indicate discourse units and shifts in discourse.

This module is one of a ten part series with Kevin Williams, produced by PaTTAN. For many students learning sign language, significant attention is place on learning hand-shapes and movements. However, in sign language, signs do not function in some obscure, separate visual realm. Thus, use of eye gaze, eye-brow movement and head movement are critical grammatical features of any form of sign language. This workshop will focus on learning about these grammatical non-manual markers and use of these non-manual behaviors while interpreting.

This module is one of a ten part series by Kevin Williams, produced by PaTTAN. During sign language learning, a great deal of focus is errantly directed towards the hands only, viewing other parts of the body as ‘extras’ or unnecessary embellishments. The fact of the matter is, that for signing to be grammatical, it is not an either/or situation (meaning face or hands), but it is both! This training will focus on the use of, primarily, the lower portion of the face, the portion used for lexical purposes.

This module is one of a ten part series by Kevin Williams, produced by PaTTAN. Language is a set of patterns and at the syntax (or sentence level), language is built on the clause level. Some clauses are independent while others are dependent on other surrounding clause for conveying intent. This workshop will focus on the analysis of classroom discourse in order to gain better ‘rhythm” predication skills while building educational interpretations, and reduce the number of ‘moving violations’ we create while interpreting.

This module is one of a ten part series by Kevin Willams, produced by PaTTAN. Verbs, by nature of visual languages, work to ‘lace’ subject/object information together, binding individual lexical items (words) into comprehensible thought. This workshop will look at the various forms of verb activity associated with natural sign languages as well as what types of verbs can be modified (inflected) to show more visually comprehensible meaning.

This module is one of a ten part series by Kevin Williams, produced by PaTTAN. In U.S. education, English is the language with which sign language is interacting. As the lexicon (vocabulary) of sign language is called up to represent or ‘talk about’ unique educational content terms or technologies, the language is using a typical language strategy; it is borrowing the term from the ‘source language’ into sign language. In sign language, this borrowing is done via fingerspelling. This workshop will focus on when and how to fingerspell, the role of fingerspelling in developing English phonemic awareness, and the development of print-literacy.

This module is one of a ten part series by Kevin Williams, produced by PaTTAN. This workshop will focus on the rather unique grammatical component of Sign Language called classifiers. Attendees will learn the various types of classifiers as well as the use of classifiers when the signer is the ‘agent.’ Instruction will focus on integrating classifiers into interpretations to better visually show actions, prepositional relationships, or types/categories or nouns.