How sign language interpreters use multimodal

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How sign language interpreters use multimodal actions to coordinate turn-taking in group work between deaf and hearing upper secondary school students Sigrid Slettebakk Berge Norwegian University of Science and Technology

This study examines interpreted group work situations involving deaf and hearing senior high school students, using Norwegian Sign Language and spoken Norwegian. The research question is: how does the sign language interpreter explicitly coordinate turn-taking in group work dialogues among deaf and hearing students? Video recordings of authentic learning situations constitute the basis for analysis of how a sign language interpreter uses multimodal actions to convey information that is used by the deaf and hearing students in establishing a shared focus of attention and thus coordinating their turn-taking. Five types of actions were recurrently identified: construction of visual gestures; timing of the interpreter’s input; use of gaze to negotiate for the deaf students’ speaking turns; left-right shifts in body position to convey information about which of the hearing students is speaking; and backward-forward shifts in body position to negotiate for shared attention. The analysis draws mainly on concepts developed by Goffman (1959, 1981), Goodwin (1994, 2000, 2007) and Wadensjö (1998). The discussion examines implications for the educational interpreter’s role set (Sarangi 2010, 2011), and the dual responsibility s/he fulfils by not only interpreting the students’ utterances, but also explicitly coordinating their interaction. Keywords: sign language interpreting, multimodal, video-analysis, explicit coordination, turn-taking, role set

Introduction This study explores the educational interpreter’s role set (Sarangi 2010, 2011), and the dual responsibility s/he fulfils by not only interpreting deaf and hearing students’ utterances, but also explicitly coordinating their interaction (Linell 1997; Roy 2000; Wadensjö 1998). https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00004.ber Interpreting 20:1 (2018), pp. 96–125. issn 1384-6647 | e-issn 1569-982x © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Multimodal actions to coordinate turn-taking between deaf and hearing students

Specifically, the research question examined in this study is: how does the sign language interpreter use multimodal actions to explicitly coordinate turn-taking among deaf and hearing senior high school students participating in group-work dialogues? Talk and embodied behaviour co-occur as interdependent phenomena; when human beings speak together in face-to-face situations they always use multiple semiotic resources, coordinating complex orchestrations of facial expression with gesturing and vocal input. Every single utterance using speech features integrated patterns of voicing and intonation, pauses and rhythm. These patterns are also manifested in embodied expressions such as movements of the eye(brow)s, the mouth and the head, sometimes accompanied by various hand movements and gestures. It is important to recognise that multimodal actions are connected to the material world in which the dialogue unfolds (Kendon 2009, in Streeck et al. 2011: 9). In this study, the multimodal actions analysed are gestures, gaze, pauses and shifts in body orientation, as identified in video recordings of authentic interpreter-mediated group work sessions involving deaf and hearing Norwegian high school students. In this context, the findings indicate that the interpreter simultaneously uses different multimodal resources to establish a shared focus of attention between the students, enabling them to coordinate their turn-taking. The coordinating aspect of the interpreter’s role is based on actions that are more concerned with managing the interaction between primary participants than with the language mediation itself (Wadensjö 1993, 1998). Such coordinating actions make up an integral part of interpreting, given the interpreter’s unique responsibility for establishing, promoting and controlling connections between primary participants in conversation. Initiatives of this sort can be geared towards generating a shared floor between the primary interlocutors (1998, page 148). Coordinating actions can take the form of explicit or implicit interventions (Wadensjö 1998: 109). Explicit coordination can be seen when the interpreter regulates turn-taking – for example, by coordinating the selection of the next speaker, preparing the addressed party to take the floor, and preparing participant(s) to be addressed by others or to elicit further information from their interlocutor(s). Implicit coordination can be based simply on the interpreter’s presence; the content of mediated utterances is filtered by the interpreter’s understanding, the communicative flow between the participants depending to a large extent on the processing time required to interpret. Interpretation between spoken and signed language or gestures is also influenced by the difference in language modalities, and the deaf participants’ visual orientation towards the interpreter (Berge & Thomassen 2015). Educational interpreters’ input can contribute to academic and social inclusion of deaf students. One of the basic traditions of teaching in Norway is the socio-cultural learning approach, highlighting that cognitive development takes © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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place in activities where the students themselves are active and in dialogue with one another (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1991). A major part of the students’ day-today activities at school therefore involves participating in different kinds of group work (Berge & Kermit 2017). Since the majority of the group members are hearing students, their discourse practices will follow spoken language conventions. An earlier study from the project that produced the work presented below examined educational interpreters’ experiences in these group work settings. They reported that it frequently proved difficult to access what the hearing students were saying, often with overlapping turns, and sometimes even to understand who was speaking to whom (Berge & Kermit, in press). Another publication from this project focused on deaf and hearing high school students’ expectations with regard to the role of the educational sign language interpreter (Berge & Ytterhus 2015). Both groups of respondents indicated their high level of satisfaction with the interpreter on three accounts: (i) their excellent language skills; (ii) coordination of the students’ interaction (through prompts regarding organisation of seating arrangements, turn-taking signals, and adjustment of their interpretation to deaf students’ visual orientation), and (iii) facilitation of small talk between students. Deaf students particularly mentioned that it was difficult to locate turn-taking opportunities in interpreted conversations, and wanted to cooperate with the interpreter in finding ways to cope with the vocally based language practice in which they wanted to be included (Berge & Ytterhus 2015). The present paper is a response to those requests, looking at examples of how turn-taking can be appropriately coordinated.

Earlier research The role of educational interpreters is a topical subject, with a number of studies affording insight into the reduced access to academic information and social participation available to deaf students in interpreted education (Antia & Kreimeyer 2001; Berge & Thomassen 2015; Harrington 2000, 2005; Marschark et al. 2005; Metzger & Fleetwood 2004; Schick 2004; Thoutenhoofd 2005; Winston 2004). It has been said that an essential part of the educational interpreter’s role is to take the responsibility to reconstruct, time and coordinate potential turn-taking moments (Metzger 1999, 2005; Roy 2000). An important study on coordination of turn-taking in dialogues with sign language interpreting is Roy’s (2000) account of a meeting between a university professor and a deaf student: this analysis showed that the interpreter facilitated pauses for negotiation, coordinated overlapping talk and constructed signals for the party who had the next speaking turn. Herreweghe’s (2002) study of two interpreted meetings, one with deaf © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


and hearing participants and one entirely in sign language, identified differences in turn negotiation between the two settings; since the deaf persons’ gaze was directed only at the interpreter most of the time, they had relatively little opportunity to be involved in the negotiation process when interacting with hearing interlocutors. The interpreters’ strategies for dealing with this were to use their own gaze to negotiate for the hearing persons’ attention, and to create signals for source attribution so that the deaf person received information about who had the floor. Hansen’s (2005) study of visually oriented language use in deaf education demonstrated the connection between interpreting, time lag and turn-taking. The general time lag she identified was between eight and ten seconds. Since the lectures and the class discussions were organised according to the majority’s vocal language conventions, the interpreter had very little time to create pauses and offer information about suitable moments for taking turns. In very few cases did the deaf students take the initiative. Warnicke and Plejert (2012) studied interpreted bimodal telephone/videophone conversations, observing that the interpreters often coordinated turn-taking by means of hand movements (e.g., gesturing to wait for turn-taking, to proceed with a turn, or to adjust body position in relation to a webcam), body posture, nods of the head, gaze and descriptions of the other participant’s actions. Berge and Raanes (2013) studied how a team of interpreters coordinated turn-taking in a meeting between five deafblind board members. Their analysis revealed that the interpreters’ footing alternated between front- and backstage activities. In some sequences, they were privately describing the context and exchanging minimal-response signals with the board member they were interpreting for; in other sequences they were exchanging information with their colleagues, but most of the time they were interpreting the public utterances taking place across the table. The shifts between front- and backstage activities facilitated effective information about what was happening around the table, which the deafblind board members used to manage their turn-taking. All the above studies have an interactional approach and use Goffman’s (1959, 1981) theoretical constructs as a basis for discourse analysis of authentic videorecorded data. The three Scandinavian studies (Berge & Raanes 2013; Hansen 2005; Warnicke & Plejert 2012) also refer to Linell (2009) and his meta-theory of human action, communication and cognition, as will be the case in the present study. While the research method of the present study resembles Hansen’s (2005), there is a difference: her analysis concentrated mostly on activities managed by the teacher, while the focus in this study is on dialogues between students.

© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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Turn-taking and establishing shared attention In dialogue, participants generally take turns to speak. A turn in a face-to-face dialogue, understood as a sequence when one person has the other’s attention and has established the right to talk and be listened to, may comprise no more than a word or span a sequence of utterances (Sacks et al. 1974). Certain points in relation to an ongoing utterance lend themselves better to turn-taking than others; these are called transition relevance places. To facilitate changes of speaker, all the participants are involved in a negotiation process where they constantly share signals to indicate a turn shift. This kind of invitation, often expressed through eye contact, voice modulation, body orientation and gestures (Goodwin 1980; Gumperz 1982), can be addressed to all the participants or to one specific person. Turn allocation techniques are thus divided into two groups, according to how the next speaker is selected: by the current speaker, or by self-selection among the listeners (Sacks et al. 1974: 703). However, the speaker is also paying attention to the listeners and to any minimal response signals or turn-taking initiatives coming from them while s/he talks. For instance, if the listener wants to speak before the ongoing turn has been completed, s/he can make a signal to this effect; the speaker can accommodate this request if s/he so wishes, taking it as a cue to finalise the turn and shift attention to the person requesting the floor. In the latter case, the turn-taking occurs sequentially, but sometimes there is overlap as several persons start to speak at the same time. In such cases, the participants need to re-establish the floor and jointly decide whose turn it is to have the others’ attention (Edelsky 1981; Morgenthaler 1988). The term “to have the floor”, in face-to-face conversation, is usually defined in the colloquial sense of having others’ attention and thus being authorised or expected to take a turn in conversation (Edelsky 1981). This involves distinctive understandings between the participants as to “what is going on”, enabling them to recognise whose turn it is, what the topic is, and what the purpose of their interaction is (page 405). In her analysis of two university meetings, Edelsky identified two types of floor: singly-developed floors (F1), organised in linear sequences of interaction, where participants’ speech is relatively formal and follows a onespeaker-at-a-time order; and collaborative floors (F2), where all the participants are free to join in the dialogue and it is characterised by informal, overlapping speech. In her data, the turns in F2 sequences were shorter and were distributed over a wider range of participants. Morgenthaler’s (1988) study examined the negotiation process involved in bidding for the floor and deciding who has it; this is often regulated by different types of eye contact between the group members, indicating who the next speaker is, how much of a turn’s allocated time is left, and when it is time to conclude and introduce a new speaker or a new topic. This nego© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


tiation is further complicated in group dialogues, with several persons involved in the exchange of visual information and in deciding who has the floor (Morgenthaler 1988). In interpreted dialogues, the dynamics become even more complex. Gaining access to turn-taking information in sign language-interpreted group interaction is subject to the time delay associated with interpreting, and the different language modalities used by the primary participants. The time delay means that information about transition relevance places (Sacks et al. 1974) is available at different moments, according to whether a participant is following an utterance in the original language or through the interpreter. For instance, when there is interpretation from spoken to signed language, information about transition relevance places is received later by deaf addressees than by hearing participants. This makes pauses for entering the conversation harder to recognise, with the result that a deaf person may accidently break into the conversation (Hansen 2005). If this occurs too often, the interlocutors’ experience of communicative flow can be undermined (Herreweghe 2002). Another reason can be that the turn-taking signals have not been interpreted at all, either because the interpreter has not captured them or because they have been lost as a result of omissions (Napier 2002). A third reason is that one interpreter has to mediate between several persons, but s/he can represent only one person at a time; in sequences with overlapping talk, the interpreter must choose which information – and which speaker – to interpret. Interaction and turn-taking in interpreter-mediated dialogues between a spoken and a signed language are also affected by the deaf person’s visual orientation. Since deaf persons are heavily dependent on their eyesight, they are visually oriented towards what they perceive to be the most relevant information source at a given time (Bagga-Gupta 2004; Harrington 2005; McIlvenny 1995; Winston 2004). Deaf students’ receptiveness to turn-taking signals from their interlocutors and from the environment is thus affected by their visual orientation. For example, if a deaf student happens to be looking into a textbook, s/he will not be aware of the other participants’ talk or the interpreter’s cues to join in the dialogue (Berge & Thomassen 2015; Berge & Ytterhus 2015, Harrington 2005; Winston 2004). Hearing students, by contrast, can look in their textbook while continuing to (over)hear the lecture and/or any comments from the students sitting close by. The fact that deaf students tend to keep their eye on the interpreter will also affect their personal exchange of minimal response signals with their interlocutors (Hansen 2005). Deaf students’ access to negotiation for the floor and for turn-taking is therefore limited, by comparison to hearing students. These are reasons why deaf students have described interpreted group dialogues as stressful and rushed (Berge & Ytterhus 2015; Hansen 2005). Documenting efficient ways to provide information so that deaf students can have ready access to the floor they share © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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with their hearing classmates is a fundamental requirement in defining the educational interpreter’s role space (Llewellyn-Jones & Lee 2013).

Role set and shifts of footing In contrast to the view that a given status in a social structure or institutional practice entails one distinct role, it has been convincingly argued that each status has an array of associated roles and role relationships when occupying a particular social position (Merton 1968, in Sarangi 2010, 2011). Some of these roles are more readily accepted than others, as they are highlighted in the public job description that requires them. Other roles might be more at variance, or in conflict, with the theoretical idea of which tasks the practitioner should be undertaking. For instance, in the healthcare setting is it shown that doctors have a repertoire of professional roles and responsibilities in any given consultation. Depending on the character of the patient, the doctor will draw on the available role set to act as a dispenser of (objective) medical treatment, a counsellor providing advice, and/or a healthcare educator for the patient. However, only the first of these roles is widely perceived and expected. To analyse how the person is “changing hats” between the different positions in the role set, Goffman’s (1981) concepts of footing, production format and participation framework are extremely relevant (Sarangi 2010, 2011). The concept of “footing” is defined as the “alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or the reception of an utterance” (Goffman 1981: 128). Dialogue involves participants in constant changes of footing; these shifts can be apparent in such situational variables as the language transaction itself, who is speaking and who is addressed, or visual cues like shifts in posture and gestures. Close analysis of footing requires that we break down the primitive notions of listener and speaker into a more nuanced account of their various configurations as part of the collective “participation framework” within which the individual utterances are produced and received (1981: 153). This means that a participation framework is jointly constructed for any given moment of speech, according to how each individual relates to its production or reception (1981: 137). The listener, as the recipient of the speaker’s utterances, is engaged in processing what is said and can use different means such as response signals or spoken utterances to indicate that this process is being carried out successfully (1981: 131). However, not all listeners are recognised by the speaker as ratified participants; some may be considered as bystanders. Even in meetings among friends, the speaker may at times be addressing some of the participants more than others. The different interlocutors’ posi© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


tions are, however, negotiable. In some circumstances the bystander can follow the talk or overhear bits of it, even becoming more involved in the conversation and thus taking on the status of an addressed and ratified participant. Indeed, such changes of footing are naturally associated with the dynamics of interaction. An individual participant’s status as speaker, addressed recipient or bystander can shift from one moment to the next (Goffman 1981: 133). When subordinated communication develops alongside the dominant communication between the speaker and the addressed recipient, it can involve a subset of the ratified participants (byplay), a ratified participant and a bystander (crossplay), or bystanders engaged in an exchange across the dominant encounter (sideplay). When participants alternate between dominant and subordinated communication, this can also be seen as a change of footing between frontstage and backstage dialogues (Goffman 1981). Subordinated interaction order is also found in interpreted communication, as the interpreter can establish backstage dialogues with colleagues or with the person s/he is interpreting for (Berge & Raanes 2013; Berge & Thomassen 2015; Warnicke & Plejert 2012). The speaker can have different degrees of responsibility for what s/he is saying, encapsulated in the concept of production format: as the author, who expresses a personal opinion by selecting the mood or form in which the meaning is encoded; as the principal or co-author of the utterance, taking on the responsibility of conveying the information content and ensuring how the utterance is perceived and further communicated; or as an animator, quoting someone else and not responsible for the substance or form of the utterance(s) concerned (Goffman 1981: 144–145). It is thus possible to analyse changes of footing in relation both to the participation status of the listener(s) (ratified participant, bystander) and to the speaker’s production format (animator, author, principal) (1981: 146). The different positions in the participation framework indicate that interactional space is available and is constantly reconfigured by the participants (Mondada 2009). A feature of this reconfiguration process is that it is often managed only through multimodal actions. Shifts of position in the participation framework can be initiated by adjustments in the participants’ spoken utterances and in their embodied actions (Goodwin & Goodwin 2004: 222). The speakers can thus pick up signals from their listeners and adapt their talk according to how (dis)engaged their audience seems. This is also an essential part of turn-taking, as the regulation of turns is often guided by visual cues for attention between the listeners and the speaker (Goffman 1981: 133). Restarts, pauses and orientation of gaze between participants are all resources that regulate participants’ turn-taking (Goodwin 1980). Before speaking, the speaker generally manages to obtain the listeners’ visual attention and, if not, may tend to pause until s/he has done so (1980: 276). However, the listener(s) will not be gazing at the speaker for the entire duration of © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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the turn, but generally from time to time, and can thus contribute to the ongoing communication with minimal response signals (Goffman 1981: 141; Goodwin 1980: 286). Visual access to interlocutors’ body language provides a useful resource for the organisation of interaction and the display of meaning. Ensuring each party’s visibility can sometimes become a practical problem, which participants must find a way to work out in the course of their interaction (Goodwin 1986: 29). The material world is an essential part of the organisation of face-to-face interaction. The environment, available artefacts and other material resources provide semiotic structures that make situated language use and embodied action possible. For instance, the body is used in quite different ways to perform environmentally coupled gestures (Goodwin 2007). By connecting the participants’ multimodal actions to situated interaction it is possible to understand how they variously and jointly contribute to its development, while attending both to the broader activities that their current actions are embedded within and to relevant phenomena in their surroundings (Goodwin 2000: 1492; Goodwin & Goodwin 2004: 223). In organising face-to-face interaction, participants respond to the embodied components of each other’s communication (Goodwin 1986). Visibility and the use of multimodal language resources are essential in interpreted education for deaf students (Berge & Thomassen 2015). Against this background, the present paper will examine various combinations of gestures, changes in body position and gaze used by the educational interpreter to ensure timely management of turn-taking and attention between deaf and hearing students. Such an approach calls for a multimodal analysis of human interaction.

Multimodal interaction analysis The video recordings presented here were made during an ethnographic classroom study on inclusive education of deaf senior high school students in Norway. The total sample comprises ten deaf and hard-of-hearing students, ten hearing students, ten teachers and ten interpreters. The empirical data consists of observations, interviews and video recordings. Five classes were observed during lessons in two (sometimes three) subjects, with each subject observed four to five times. Each observation was followed by unscripted interviews with the teacher and the interpreter(s), and sometimes with the deaf student(s). To minimise the effect of observer’s paradox (Sarangi 2007), the video recordings of one to two lessons per class were made on the last day of fieldwork in each class. These recordings were catalogued according to repeatedly observed activities. Illustrative video extracts were presented and discussed in focused interviews (Brinkman & Kvale 2015) with © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


the actors involved: the deaf student(s), groups of hearing students as well as the teacher(s) and interpreter(s). (There were sometimes several teachers and interpreters working in the classroom.) The interviews were conducted in each informant’s preferred language (Norwegian or Norwegian Sign Language), recorded as audio or video files and transcribed/translated into written Norwegian. The selected video recordings discussed here document authentic group work situations between deaf and hearing senior high school students. The system of transcription is based on that of Heath, Hindmarsh and Luff (2010), suitable for multimodal interaction analysis in professional practice. The content of the recordings was transcribed, including transliteration of Norwegian Sign Language, in written Norwegian. Transcriptions include not only spoken and signed utterances, but also actions such as environmentally coupled gestures, changes in body position and gaze orientation. This makes it possible to study the individual contributions by the various participants, as well as the sequential interaction order (Goodwin 1994, 2000; Heath & Hindmarsh 2002; Heath et al. 2010; Mondada 2009). The transcriptions of sign language, for which a transcription key is given at the end of the article, are inspired by the work of Engberg-Pedersen (1991). This necessarily gives only a limited representation of what was actually taking place: a sign language is a visual gestural language for which there is no comprehensive written representation. The transcriptions are also complicated by the presence of interpreting, with overlapping talk and time lag. The level of detail in the transcription is consistent with the study’s focus on the interpreters’ multimodal actions in relation to the situated activity and the other participants’ actions. The video analyses were carried out as follows: when the fieldwork in all ten classrooms had been completed, all the video recordings were watched again and a brief transcription was made of each (in the form of a Word document). This transcription was then coded, creating an overview of the various teaching activities and their main features. The next step was to create maps with video extracts of similar episodes, so that representative extracts could be mapped together across subjects and disciplines. One of these maps was related to interpreted group work between deaf and hearing students. The video recordings include a total of five formal group work situations in four different subjects, involving five interpreters in all. A multimodal, in-depth transcription of these video extracts was then made. Sequences were transcribed in ELAN, a computer program for video analysis of social interaction and language use. Repeatedly looking through those video extracts in detail, I discovered different ways in which the interpreters used multimodal actions to establish a shared floor and explicitly coordinate students’ turn-taking. The most frequent examples of this multimodality were: gestures, timing of the interpreter’s input, use of © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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gaze to negotiate for deaf students’ speaking turns, left-right shifts in body position to convey information about which hearing student was speaking, and backward-forward shifts in body position to negotiate for floor allocation. While these strategies were used by all the interpreters in the sample, the clearest examples were associated with one interpreter in particular. There are probably a number of reasons for this. First, the deaf student (referred to here by the fictitious name Lisa) was at times unaware of spoken turn-taking signals (unlike some of the hard-of-hearing students). Second, Lisa was also interested in taking an active part in dialogues among her fellow-students, who were willing to include her. Third, all the students found the assignments interesting enough for discussion. Since this combination of conditions was not fully present in the other videorecorded group work activities, the presented excerpts all involve Lisa and her interpreter. Various hearing students (referred to here by fictitious names) are involved.

Analysis Excerpt 1: Gestures Excerpt 1 highlights how the interpreter uses gestures addressed to Lisa, the deaf student, drawing her attention to the parallel sideplay among the three hearing classmates Anna, Betty and Carol (who are seated to her immediate right, with the interpreter standing in front of them). The students are working individually on a history task in their textbook. Though the teacher has not told the students to work as a group, their experience as a class suggests that they can cooperate with one another if they want to (Berge & Kermit, in press). While the students are reading, Anna, Betty and Carol sometimes talk to each another, as do the other hearing students in the class. Such sideplay is generally not interpreted as it can be difficult for the interpreter to catch what the students are saying among themselves, and in most cases they are not addressing Lisa directly (Berge & Kermit, in press). However, when the interpreter does pick up some information that she thinks Lisa might be interested in, she creates an environmentally coupled gesture (Goodwin 2007) to inform Lisa of the ongoing sideplay. One occurrence of this is transcribed in Excerpt 1.



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Excerpt 1. What is said 1 2 3

Lisa: Interpreter: Betty:

4 5 6

Anna: Anna/Betty: Interpreter:

7 8 9

-Anna/Betty: Interpreter:

“Do you know what fascist means?” “It’s right here.” “®xxx®” (about 3 minutes)

“MEANING (…)” “®xxx®” (about xx minutes)

10 11

Lisa: Interpreter:

12 13 14

Lisa: Anna: Betty:

15 16 17 18 19 20

Carol: Betty/Carol: Betty: Lisa/An/Ca: Anna: Carol:

21

Anna:

22

Interpreter:

23 24 25

-Lisa: Interpreter:

26

Anna:

27 28

Carol: Interpreter:

29 30

Lisa: Interpreter:

“EXCITING/point Anna SHE/point Carol TODAY HAVE NO FOCUS/negation READ ALL, MUST?/left shift POINT/Anna/right shift YOU NEED NOT/negation JUST READ FAST THROUGH” “Shall we do the exercises when we’ve finished the reading?” “Yes, sure.” “READ FINISH, QUESTION DISCUSS?/right shift YES/left shift” “BOTH QUESTIONS?” “Shall we do both exercises?”

31 32

Anna: Interpreter:

“Yes, I think so.” “YES, THINK BOTH/nod”

33

Lisa:

“OK/nod”

What is being done ((she is reading in her book)) ((hands in rest position)) ((she turns and looks at Anna)) ((she points in textbook)) ((they continue to talk)) ((she extends her right hand towards Lisa)) ((she pauses)) ((they continue to talk)) ((she lays her right hand on Lisa’s desk)) ((she looks up))

“POINT/Anna and Betty DISCUSS, WHAT MEAN F-AS-C-I-S-T, LIKE F-R-A-N-C-O, FOR EXAMPLE/left shift? ONE PERSON DECIDES EVERYTHING. LIKE DICTATOR/right shift, OK I UNDERSTAND/point Betty”

“®xxx®” “®xxx®” “®xxx®”

“I think this was exciting stuff.” “ but I just can’t focus today!” “But it’s not so crucial that you have to read the whole thing. You can just skim through it quickly.”

“”


((she looks in her textbook)) ((she looks in her textbook)) ((she talks socially with the students in front of her)) ((she turns to Betty)) ((they talk socially)) ((she leaves her chair)) ((they read in their textbooks)) ((she turns towards Carol)) ((she turns towards Anna))

((she turns to Carol)) ((she extends her right hand towards Lisa)) ((she is signing slowly)) ((she looks up at the interpreter))

((she gazes at Lisa)) ((she turns to Carol)) ((she turns to Betty)) ((she looks at Lisa))

((she looks at the interpreter)) ((she leans her body forward towards Anna and establishes eye contact)) ((she turns to the interpreter)) ((she turns her body orientation towards Lisa)) ((she starts to read))

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The interpreter twice creates an environmentally coupled gesture to attract Lisa’s attention (lines 9 and 22). The first time is a conversation that starts in line 3, when Betty turns to Anna to ask her what the word “fascist” means. Anna gives an explanation (line 4) and their conversation continues (line 5). Since Lisa is looking at her book, she does not notice their sidetalk. The interpreter does, and she decides to interpret it for Lisa. Before doing so, she lays her right hand on the desk, just within Lisa’s field of vision (see Figure 1). When the interpreter lays her hand on the table, she constructs an environmentally coupled gesture to tell Lisa that “a conversation is taking place” and suggest that she might want to pay attention. The gesture has an explicit coordinating function, as it ensures that Lisa watches an interpretation of the other students’ talk (lines 10- 11). However, she rapidly turns back to her textbook (line 12). The second gesture occurs when Anna turns to Carol and they are starting to form an idea of the assignment (Betty has, in the meantime, left her seat) (lines 19–21). Anna asks Carol if she would like to do the exercises with her (line 26), which Carol agrees to (line 27). Lisa is not directly addressed as a ratified receiver of Anna and Carol’s utterances, but she is seated next to Anna and thus has the status of a bystander with the option of joining in if she wants to. However, as Lisa is looking at her book, she is not aware of the sidetalk between Anna and Carol. She is therefore hardly in a position to negotiate a new footing as a ratified member of their dialogue. The dialogue is, however, picked up by the interpreter and she makes an environmentally coupled gesture by putting out her right hand towards Lisa (line 22), and slowly signing “exciting” (line 23). Lisa notices and looks up at the interpreter (line 24), who first summarises what the other two students have said (line 25) and then interprets the ongoing dialogue in real time (lines 26–28). The interpreter’s contribution can be defined as an explicit coordinating action, establishing attention between the students. She has given Lisa an opportunity to establish a common floor with Anna and Carol: Lisa can thus change footing, from bystander to ratified group member, contributing to the discussion of the schedule for the assignment by seeking to establish how many questions must be answered (line 29). This excerpt illustrates that the students’ participation framework is constantly negotiated and that the interpreter has a role within this negotiation process. The students’ framing of “who should work and talk with whom” depends on their individual status as group members. That status cannot be taken for granted, since each student needs to display an interest in working with the others. Lisa has less opportunity than her classmates to position herself as an addressed conversational partner in informal group-work activities. The hearing students can perfectly well continue to read the textbook while overhearing the other students’ conversation. Lisa, however, cannot look at her book and also pick up an © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


Figure 1. Sequence corresponding to lines 8–11 in Excerpt 1

interpretation of the other students’ talk at the same time. The coordinating gestures of the interpreter therefore have an inclusive function, promoting Lisa’s position as a participant in group-work activities. The two episodes illustrate the interpreter’s shift of footing. First, she shifts between backstage and frontstage dialogues; her gestures are shared with Lisa backstage, and the latter uses the information to engage in the frontstage dialogue between Anna and Carol. Second, the interpreter’s gestures introduce a shift in Lisa’s footing, from bystander (listening to the hearing students’ conversation) to author of gestures (based on her understanding of the ongoing activity). This illustrates that interpreters do much more than convey spoken utterances (Linell 1997). The above excerpt also documents how the interpreter times the interpretation of Lisa’s utterance to best effect, first using gaze and body position to negotiate a shared floor between the students (line 30). The next excerpt allows a closer look at how the interpreter manages timing.

Excerpt 2: Timing of the interpreter’s input Excerpt 2 highlights the interpreter’s attempts to time the mediation according to the pauses in talk and the transition relevance place (Sacks et al. 1974). This type of coordination is related to the time lag that is created by the interpreting process, and in this analysis is found to be of key importance for how the interpreter manages her coordinating actions. In this excerpt, taking place after the students have completed their reading (see end of Excerpt 1), Anna turns towards Betty and asks if they should start the group-work discussion. Excerpt 2. 1 2 3 4 5

Anna: Betty: Interpreter: Lisa: Anna:

6 7

Interpreter: Lisa:

What is said “Shall we do the first assignment?” “Yes.” “ASSIGNMENT ONE, START?” “YES/nod” “In the text above, it is asserted that: No: I don’t like reading aloud, go ahead and read it to yourselves.” “READ YOURSELVES”


What is being done ((she turns towards Betty)) ((she turns towards Anna)) ((she looks at Lisa)) ((she reads aloud from her textbook))

((she starts to read))

109

110


8 9

Carol: Anna:

“Oh please, can’t you read aloud?” “It’s so embarrassing, but okay: in the text it is asserted that (she continues)…” “?”

10

Lisa:

11

Interpreter:

12

Lisa:

13 14

Interpreter: Lisa:

(…)

15

--

16 17

Interpreter --

“H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-IC-A-L, MEANING WHAT?” “Nod”

18

19 20 21 22 23

“POINT/Anna READ ALOUD” “Nod”

((she turns to Anna))

((she looks at the other students, she turns to the interpreter))

((she looks down at her textbook)) ((she folds her hands)) ((she looks up and establishes eye contact with the interpreter)) ((she fingerspells))

((she leans forward towards Anna, looks at her, and waits))

Anna:

“-the West’s focus on human rights can be described as hypocritical. Find arguments that support this point of view and find arguments against it.”/ Interpreter: /“What does hypocritical mean?” Anna/Betty: Betty: Interpreter:

24

Betty:

25

Interpreter:

“Well, it’s like that you say one thing and do another.” “Excuse me, what did you say?/ SORRY, AGAIN”

((she looks at Anna)) ((they look up at the interpreter)) (Background noise) ((she leans forward towards Betty, holding the gaze))

“It’s like being false, for instance if you say that people aren’t supposed to do something and then you do it yourself.” ((she looks at the interpreter)) “MEANING FALSE, SAY ((she straightens up her SOMETHING WRONG, DO posture and turns her eyes YOURSELF ANYWAY” and body orientation towards Lisa))

Initially, Anna turns to Betty and asks if they should start working on the first task (line 1). The interpreter conveys the question in Norwegian Sign Language (line 3), with both Betty and Lisa expressing their agreement (lines 2 and 4). In line 5, Anna first starts to read the question from the textbook, before briefly clarifying with Betty and Carol whether she is actually supposed to do so. However, the interpreter conveys Anna’s question as an instruction that they should read the text themselves (line 6), and Lisa begins to do so (line 7). Two parallel activities are now taking place: the three hearing students are reading the text together (lines 8–9), while Lisa is reading it on her own. Lisa does not seem completely aware of this, prompting her to look at the other students. Then she asks the interpreter for an explanation (line 10). The interpreter’s description of what the three hearing girls are doing (line 11) establishes a common floor, with Lisa now understanding what is going on and agreeing to continue reading the text by herself © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


(line 12). The clarification sequence (lines 10–12) illustrates a backstage dialogue between the interpreter and Lisa, while the interaction among the three hearing girls who are reading is taking place frontstage. The next sequence shows how the interpreter times the interpretation of Lisa’s utterance, first using gaze and shifts of body position to negotiate a shared floor between the students. Encountering the word “hypocritical” in the text, Lisa does not understand it and seeks an explanation. To do so, she establishes eye contact with the interpreter (line 14) and asks what the word means (line 15). Here, the interpreter starts to coordinate the students’ participation framework, linking Lisa’s question to the frontstage activity of the hearing students. Since they are busy reading, there is no available turn-taking moment for Lisa’s question, and the interpreter decides to wait until the floor is ready (line 17). To negotiate for Anna’s and Betty’s attention she uses various multimodal resources, balancing her footing between backstage and frontstage activities; backstage, her initial nodding signal to Lisa indicates that she has put the latter’s question on hold (line 16). Lisa folds her hands and waits, directing her gaze towards Anna. The interpreter now leans forward towards Anna and gazes at her, holding this position until the reading is about to be completed (line 18), and only then does she interpret Lisa’s question (line 19). The sound of the interpreter’s voice makes the hearing girls look up, resulting in eye contact between the interpreter, Anna and Betty (lines 20–21). Betty responds to Lisa’s question accordingly (line 22). While interpreting, the interpreter looks first at Betty, then nods towards Lisa (line 25), who turns slightly so as to see her classmates. In this sequence, the various parties all use body position as a signal to their interlocutors. This indicates that the group has established a common floor, with a shared understanding of who can lay claim to the next turn. Here, thanks to the interpreter’s actions, Lisa turns from a bystander of the hearing students’ dialogue into a ratified participant (see Figure 2). Excerpt 2 illustrates that the interpreter alternates her footing between the role sets of language mediation and explicit coordination of interaction. She achieves this coordination through a number of multimodal actions: description of the other students’ activity, use of gestures (a nod of the head) to ensure Lisa is ready to follow the interpretation, negotiation for the hearing students’ attention (by leaning forward and gazing), and identification of a transition relevance place for turn allocation (when eye contact is established). These actions prepare the ground for Lisa’s utterance to be “heard” by the other students. Interpreting the question while the hearing students were busy reading would probably have been less effective: they might not have caught her question or, if they did, it might have hindered the communicative flow in the dialogue. This indicates how the interpreter’s implementation of her role set can impact deaf students’ participation status in learning activities with their hearing peers. © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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Excerpt 3: Use of gaze A speaker often establishes eye contact with the hearer before and during a speech (Goodwin 1980, 2007). Excerpt 3 shows how the interpreter uses her gaze to explicitly coordinate the students’ allocation of attention and, from there, negotiates for Lisa’s turn to speak. Her actions are prompted by the time lag and by Lisa’s lack of direct eye contact with three hearing students. The group-work session involves a history quiz. The desks are arranged in long lines. Lisa’s group is situated at the end of the back row, with Andy sitting to Lisa’s right and Ben on the other side of him. The interpreter and Daisy are sitting in front of them. Since Ben is responsible for writing down the group’s answers, any active contribution presupposes first establishing eye contact with him. However, the seating arrangement, the time lag and the different language modalities limit the opportunity for Lisa to establish eye contact with Ben and the other hearing students. Excerpt 3 documents the students’ dialogue about the second quiz question, illustrating how the interpreter uses her gaze to ensure that the students are all paying attention and how this creates a floor for coordination of their turn-taking. Excerpt 3. 1

Teacher:

2 3

Andy/Ben: Andy:

4

5 6 7 8 9

10

What is said “Question two: What are the three branches in the principle of separation of powers?”

“It’s the judicial, executive and legislative.” Interpreter: “PRINCIPLE POWER SEPARATE, THREE BRANCH-OF: NAME WHAT?” Lisa: “Nod” Interpreter: “JUDICIAL EXECUTIVE LEGISLATIVE” Lisa: “Nod” Ben: “What did you say again?” Andy: “Judicial and executive, but what is the last one called again? Was it legislative, or?” Interpreter: “LAST-ONE NAME WHAT, LEGISLATIVE?”


What is being done ((he reads aloud from his quiz sheet))

((they turn towards each other)) ((he looks at Ben))

((she looks at the interpreter))

((she turns to Andy and Ben)) ((he writes down the answer)) ((he looks at Daisy))

((she looks at Lisa))


11 12

Lisa: “Nod” Interpreter:

13 14 15 16

-“Yes, it was legislative.” Daisy: “Yeah, that was it.” Interpreter: “LEGISLATIVE/nod SHE SAY/point Daisy” Lisa: “Nod”

17 18

Lisa:

19 20

-“RIGHT ANSWER” Interpreter:

21 22 23 24 25 26

-Ben: Lisa: Interpreter: Andy: Teacher:

(…)

“Right answer.” “Yeah/nod.” “nod” “YES/nod” “Yeah, that was good.” “Okay, next question.”

((she looks at the interpreter)) ((she turns and leans her body forward towards Ben and establishes eye contact))

((she leans her body back and turns towards Lisa)) ((she looks at the other students and the interpreter in turn)) ((they pause)) ((she establishes eye contact with the interpreter)) ((she turns and leans her body forward towards Ben and establishes eye contact)) ((he turns to Lisa and smiles)) ((she turns to Ben and smiles)) ((she looks at Lisa and Ben in turn))

In line 1, the teacher asks a question about the separation of powers in Norway. Immediately, Andy and Ben look at each other as if they are about to discuss the answer. Andy volunteers: “it’s the judiciary, the executive and the legislative” (line 3). Ben asks him to repeat the answer so that he can write it down (line 8), and Andy does so (line 9). However, he seeks confirmation for the last part of his answer from the other students (end of line 8). In this sequence, Andy’s quick answer has created a relatively long time lag in the interpretation. By the time the interpreter conveys the question to Lisa, the other three students are already discussing Andy’s answer (line 9). The interpreter obviates the problem of the time lag by means of an omission (Napier 2002), skipping Ben’s request for a repetition of Andy’s answer (line 8), and taking the latter’s tentative reiteration of it (line 9) as the input for her interpretation (line 10). This textual coordination affords Lisa access to the same floor as the other students. However, the interpreter also coordinates the students’ interaction. Andy’s question creates a transition relevance place (line 9), as highlighted by the interpreter’s gaze (line 10), to which Lisa creates a response signal (a nod), meaning that she agrees with Andy regarding the inclusion of ‘legislative’ (line 11). However, the seating arrangement makes it difficult for Andy and the other students to pick up Lisa’s response signal. The interpreter therefore reconstructs it by means of the vocal utterance “yes, it’s called legislative” (line 13), first negotiating for Ben’s attention by leaning towards him until they have established eye contact (line 12). This eye contact indicates that a new floor is established, and that the turn is available to Lisa. Daisy and Andy are also involved in this arrangement, as they are listening to the interpretation of Lisa’s response and can disagree or, in the event, agree with her (see Figure 3).


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The interpreter’s multimodal actions (gaze direction, leaning forward and holding the position) have explicitly coordinated the students’ participation framework. The same strategy is again observed when Lisa confirms her view that they have answered the question correctly (line 19). Once again the interpreter leans forward towards Ben and holds this position until they have established eye contact (line 20). Here, Ben turns to Lisa with a smile and a nod (line 22), at which she returns his response signals (line 23). This is a sequence of direct and personal exchanges of minimal response signals between Lisa and the other students. Mostly, the interpreter conveys visual minimal response signals (nods) that coincide with her language interpretation (lines 15 and 24). Minimal response signals have a significant role in maintaining the dialogue between the participants (Linell 2009). However, listeners necessarily comply with cultural traditions relating to how long and how intensely they can gaze at a speaker (Goffman 1981; Goodwin 1980). This rule seems to be the same for the interpreter; she adjusts her gaze and initial nod of her head, according to the aim she wants to achieve. Sometimes she stares at whoever she is seeking attention from, but sometimes she looks at the students without giving the impression of even seeing them (Goffman 1981: 141). This finding echoes Wadensjö’s (1993, 1998) analysis of the interpreter’s dual role as a listener and as a contributor of suitable responses directed at the primary participants.

Excerpt 4: Left-right shifts in body position to give information about who is speaking Knowing the speaker’s identity is a basic element in dialogue (Linell 2009). In interpreted group dialogues like those in the present study, it can be difficult for the deaf person to construct an overview of the various speakers’ identities (Berge & Thomassen 2015; Metzger 2005). Excerpt 4 focuses on the interpreter’s use of right and left shifts in body orientation to convey visual information about which of the hearing students is talking. The setting is a sociology class, with Lisa and two hearing students involved in a group-work session. Lisa is seated in the middle, with Emma to her right and Frida to her left. The interpreter is seated right in front of Lisa. The class has been told to select a topic in their book and prepare © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


an overview of relevant points for discussion. The students have decided to focus on social stratification and the difference between being poor in Norway and in developing countries. When the excerpt starts they are discussing public welfare in various countries. Excerpt 4. 1

Emma:

2

Interpreter:

3

Frida:

4 5

Interpreter: Lisa:

6

Interpreter:

7

Emma:

9

Interpreter:

10

Frida:

11

Interpreter:

12 13

Lisa: Interpreter:

14

Emma:

15

Interpreter:

16

Frida:

17 18

Lisa: Interpreter:

What is said: “What I wanted to say is that rich in Norway and rich in other countries, that’s quite similar really, but poor in Norway and poor in other countries that can be really different, because there’s not such a huge difference between classes in Norway as there is in other countries. We could address that in our task?” “POINT/Emma RICH NORWAY/right shift RICH OTHER COUNTRY/left shift, THAT/point REALLY EQUAL/nod, BUT POOR NORWAY/right shift POOR OTHER COUNTRY/left shift THAT DIFFERENT! WHY? HERE NORWAY CLASS BIGSEPARATE NOT/negation, DISCUSS CAN?” “Mm/nod” “Nod” “BUT TOPIC CONNECT-DOWNTO-BOOK?” “But isn’t that a slightly different topic? Isn’t it different than (…)” “But it’s about the distribution of public goods and the poor.” “BUT MONEY THINGS, SHARE: DISTRIBUTE PUBLIC GOODS, MEAN POOR WHO?” “Yeah, the differences between the poor and the distribution of goods, in Norway and abroad.” “POINT/Frida MEANING WE DISCUSS, DIFFERENT HOW MONEY PUBLIC GOODS DISTRIBUTE, NORWAY/right shift COMPARE OTHER COUNTRY/left shift” “Nod” “Mm/nod” “Yes, because the poor in Norway will have access to a lot of goods that the poor in developing countries don’t have.” “BECAUSE NORWAY POOR HAVE GOODS, OTHER COUNTRY/left shift POOR HAVE SAME NOT/negation” “Mm. Because of everything that we get for free, like healthcare, schools and things like that.” “YES/nod, BECAUSE NORWAY


What is being done: ((she shifts and looks at Frida))

((she shifts to the right))

((she shifts and looks at Emma)) ((she shifts to the left)) ((she touches the book)) ((she turns towards Emma)) ((she looks at Lisa and the interpreter in turn)) ((she shifts to the right))

((she looks at Emma))

((she shifts to the left))

((she looks at Emma and Frida in turn)) ((she looks at Frida))


((she looks towards Emma))

/((she lifts her right hand)) /((she establishes eye

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116


19 20

Lisa Interpreter

21

Emma:

22

Lisa:

23

Interpreter:

24 25 26 27 28

Frida: Interpreter: Emma: Interpreter: Frida:

29

Interpreter:

30

Emma:

31

Interpreter:

HEALTHCARE FREE, SCHOOL FREE”/ “I THINK (…)” “I think (…)”

“I THINK: POVERTY TWO NAME: R-E-L-A-T-I-V-E POVERTY, THAT NORWAY HAVE, OTHER COUNTRY HAVE EXTREME POVERTY” “I think: it’s a different type of poverty: we have relative poverty compared to the extreme poverty that other countries have.” “Yes.” “YES/nod” “Yes.” “YES/nod” “Because in Norway we only have relative poverty, we don’t have extreme poverty.” “YES/nod NORWAY HAVE ONLY RELATIVE POVERTY” “Yes, perhaps the homeless are extremely poor, but I’m not sure that’s extreme poverty either.” “POINT/Emma MAYBE EXAMPLE HOMELESS PERSON, BUT THAT EXTREME POOR? I DON’T KNOW?”

contact with Lisa)) ((she pauses)) ((she leans forward towards Emma)) ((she looks at the interpreter)) ((she looks at the interpreter))

((she looks at Lisa, Emma and Frida in turn))

((she ((she ((she ((she ((she

looks at Lisa)) shifts to the left)) looks at Lisa)) shifts to the right )) looks at Emma))

((she shifts to the left))


Emma begins by suggesting a perspective to develop in the group discussion (line 1), to which Frida nods her agreement (line 3). With only one interpreter representing the two hearing students, it can be difficult for Lisa to distinguish who is saying what. The interpreter therefore uses her body position and sign location to frame the two students’ identities in relation to the layout of the seating. When the interpreter is reproducing Emma’s utterances, she orients her body and signing to her right (line 2); when she is interpreting Frida (line 4), she turns to her left and positions her signing accordingly. The interpreter begins some of her turns by briefly pointing at the student who she is interpreting (lines 2, 11 and 31). A similar use of pointing has also been observed by Warnicke and Plejert (2012) and Berge and Raanes (2013), while left-right shifts in interpreters’ body positions have been documented by Nilsson (2016) when analysing metaphors of time in signed lectures. In the present case, the interpreter’s use of different body positions has an explicitly coordinative function towards Lisa and indicates to her who is speaking. The interpreter also uses different body positions when introducing Lisa as the next speaker. In line 17 Lisa raises her hand to her mouth and creates a thinking gesture. The interpreter catches this signal while she is interpreting Emma’s utterance (line 18); when Lisa signs: “I THINK” (line 19), the interpreter has



already started to lean forward towards Emma and Frida (line 20), and at the same time she verbally introduces Lisa as the next speaker by saying: “I’m thinking …” (line 20). Both Emma and Frida now turn towards the interpreter (line 21). This indicates acceptance of a new floor for the participants’ attention, which they use to manage their turn-taking. The interpreter’s simultaneous action in lines 18, 19 and 20 seems to have a dual function: negotiating for attention from Emma and Frida, and offering Lisa support in turn-taking. This excerpt again illustrates a shift in footing within the interpreter’s production format, alternating between principal of the primary participants’ utterances and author of coordinative actions. However, there is also a sequence in this excerpt where the interpreter is not taking this dual responsibility. In line 5, Lisa responds to Emma’s suggestion by querying whether it is related to the material in their textbook (which was a criterion set by the teacher). Here the interpreter contributes no explicit coordinating signals: Lisa simply starts to sign (line 5), and the interpreter conveys her utterance directly in spoken Norwegian (line 6). Even though Lisa (through the interpreter’s voice) is interrupting the ongoing conversation, she does not receive a negative response from Emma or Frida and the turn-taking works. In face-to-face dialogues, interlocutors do not always wait for an invitation to speak. Their turns can overlap, and they must come to an agreement as to who should keep the turn (Edelsky 1981; Morgenthaler 1988). In this way different discourse traditions frame the interpreter’s role, including her responsibility to select the most effective strategies for interpreting and coordinating the primary participants’ dialogue (Harrington 2000, 2005).

Excerpt 5: Backward-forward shifts of body position to negotiate for attention Speakers often establish prior eye contact with their interlocutor(s) (Goodwin 1980). Excerpt 5 focuses on the interpreter’s backward-forward shifts of body position when, on Lisa’s behalf, she seeks eye contact with the hearing students so as to gain their attention. This excerpt is from the same group-work session as Excerpts 1 and 2, already examined above. Here, the four students are working individually on their assignment. To ask Anna a question, the interpreter reproduces Lisa’s utterances in spoken Norwegian. Before doing so, she uses gaze and shifts of body position to ensure that she has Anna’s attention.


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Excerpt 5. What is said 1

Lisa:

2

--

3 4

Interpreter: --

5

Anna:

6

Interpreter:

“Do you like history and philosophy?”

7 8 9 11

Anna: Interpreter: Lisa: Interpreter:

“Mm, it’s really exciting.” “EXCITING/nod” ((she looks at Lisa)) “Nod” “Mm/nod”

12

Anna:

13

Interpreter:

14

--

“I think it’s one of the best classes I’ve had.” “THINK SINCE, UNTIL NOW, ONE OF BEST /nod” (…)

15 16

Anna: Lisa:

(…) “ASSIGNMENTS?”

17

Interpreter:

“What are the assignments like?”

18

Anna:

19

Interpreter:

“Well, there’s a lot of discussion, but I’m not so talkative myself, mostly I just sit and listen.” “MUCH DISCUSS, ME TALK MUCH NOT/negation” “Nod…”

Lisa:

“ASK HER/point at Anna CLASS HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY, LIKE?” “Nod”

What is being done ((she looks up from the textbook and establishes eye contact with the interpreter))

((she looks at Lisa)) ((she shifts and leans her body forward towards Anna, she holds the position)) ((she is drinking, when she notices the interpreter’s position she looks at her)) ((she establishes eye contact with Anna)) ((she turns towards Lisa)) ((she turns ((she looks in turn)) ((she looks and Lisa in ((she looks

towards Anna)) at Anna & Lisa at the interpreter turn)) at Lisa))

((she places her hands in a rest position while she looks at Lisa)) ((she looks at Lisa)) ((she looks at the interpreter)) ((she leans her body forward towards Anna and establishes eye contact)) ((she turns towards Lisa))

((she looks at Lisa)) ((she starts to read again))

To communicate with Anna, Lisa first establishes eye contact with the interpreter (line 1), but she specifies who she wants to address her utterance to by pointing to Anna. She then signs her question, asking Anna’s opinion about one of the other classes she is taking (line 2). The interpreter’s initial nodding signal to Lisa indicates that she has put her question on hold (line 3). Since Anna is looking the other way, the interpreter’s way of catching her attention on Lisa’s behalf is to lean forward towards her (line 4) and hold this position until she has established eye contact (line 5). Only then does the interpreter address Lisa’s question to Anna (line 6). The interpreter does not hold this position; in conveying Anna’s answer to Lisa, she turns towards the latter (line 8). The same pattern of backward-forward and left-right shifts of body position occurs again at the end of the excerpt (lines 17 and 19). Anna confirms her enthusiasm for the history and philosophy class (line 12). When interpreting this answer, the interpreter constructs an embodied gesture, folding her arms in a resting position, and continues to look at Lisa (line 14). Following the interpreter’s gaze, Anna also turns towards Lisa (line 15), who thus understands that she still



has the floor. Lisa then asks a new question about the assignments (line 16), which Anna answers (line 17). If the interpreter had begun to look at Anna, or started to interpret one of the various loosely related conversations taking place at that particular juncture, Lisa would probably have lost her turn. In this respect, the different ways in which the interpreter times her gaze, gestures and shifts of body position seem to have an important function in coordinating turn allocation with the students. Again, we can see that the interpreter and the primary participants change body position to negotiate for attention and confirm that they agree whose turn it is to speak. The analysis of this excerpt demonstrates how the interpreter systematically uses gaze, gesture and body position to coordinate the interaction between the students. It also documents the flow of interaction between the primary participants and the interpreter. When the interpreter changes body position, the students also do so. It is as though they were attempting to negotiate an agreed course of action through talk, while also paying attention to the broader context of their current actions and to relevant phenomena in their surroundings (Goodwin 2000: 1492).

Discussion This study has documented an educational interpreter’s role in authentic groupwork dialogues between one deaf and several hearing students. The historical reason for employing sign language interpreters in schools was – and still is – the political goal of inclusion for all pupils, irrespective of disability (Antia & Kreimeyer 2001; Harrington 2005; Marschark et. al 2005; Metzger & Fleetwood 2004; Schick 2004; Thoutenhoofd 2005). Inclusion in these settings depends not only on access to teachers’ information, but also on opportunities to participate in activities organised by the students. The term ‘participation’ refers to actions demonstrating simultaneous forms of mutual involvement, performed by parties within evolving structures of talk (Goodwin 2000; Goodwin & Goodwin 2004). Forms of mutual involvement can be seen in students’ different ways of taking the floor, exchanging response signals, negotiating for attention and agreeing on allocation of speaking turns. Practising inclusion is much more difficult in bilingual and interpreted learning situations than in classrooms where all the students use the same language. The role space of educational interpreters thus includes scope for facilitating participation in interaction between deaf and hearing students. This study has pinpointed ways that educational interpreters use multimodal resources as coordinating actions. Five types of actions were recurrently identified: gestures, timing of the interpreter’s input, use of gaze, left-right shifts in body © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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position, and backward-forward shifts in body position. These actions are combined in different ways. The interpreter’s coordinating role seems just as important as interpreting per se. It seems that an essential part of the educational interpreter’s job is to frame the event (Goffman 1981), making situated decisions about what is happening and how the individual participants relate to each other in the given sequence of interaction. From this evaluation, the interpreter chooses a way of handling the group dynamics and the individuals’ need for support. The choices are constantly changing; what is perceived as an efficient strategy at a given moment might not be seen as efficient on a subsequent occasion – or even in the following interaction sequence. More knowledge about the different ways of coordinating interaction is useful for the interpreters themselves, but also for the deaf and hearing students who depend on them every day for successful participation in group-work dialogues. When I have presented video excerpts from group-work situations in conferences and seminars (Berge 2012, 2014), the hearing students’ way of speaking (sideplay, overlapping talk and lack of a strictly timed focus) has sometimes been perceived as non-inclusive. I don’t think this is the hearing students’ intention. The study presented here was complemented by interviews with deaf and hearing students regarding their expectations of the educational interpreter’s role (Berge & Ytterhus 2015): in this regard, there was no indication that the hearing students were at any time intentionally excluding the deaf students from their dialogues or their activities. They simply talk as they are used to doing. Both groups of students also say that they want the interpreter to coordinate their turn-taking and help them to create an interpreter-friendly environment. Another finding in the interviews was that neither of the student groups had received any information about how communication might be affected by an interpreter’s presence and the time required for language processing. Neither had the deaf students talked with their interpreters about how they could work together to manage turn-taking sequences, even though participation in group discussions was seen as one of the most challenging activities in their schooling (Berge & Ytterhus 2015). One indication emerging from this study is that educational interpreters, deaf and hearing students all have to communicate more with one another – hence the rationale for further research focusing on the different ways in which interpreters contribute to the dynamics of group interaction in settings like the one examined here. Professional practices situated in human interaction must respond to different role expectations. A role set inevitably privileges some roles over others (Sarangi 2010). For educational interpreters, the role of doing “other tasks” than language mediation is rarely highlighted in their job description (Metzger & Fleetwood 2004). What professionals think they are doing, and what tasks they actually include in their role set, will depend on their education and the socialised focus © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


of their professional practice (Sarangi 2007). This article has examined groupwork situations where the interpreter sits or stands in the middle of the students. From this physical position, she is able to look directly at each of the students and, when appropriate, actively moves into their field of vision, negotiating for their attention. This is quite a different strategy than the one I was taught as a young interpreting student in the late 1990s: our textbook recommended that the interpreter should sit a little behind the speakers, in the least visible position possible (Solow 1981). Back then, interpreters were trained to focus on language mediation; other tasks that they might find necessary for discourse management were equated, in professional parlance, with “stepping out of their role” (Tate & Turner 1997/2002). This is consistent with the monological model of interpreted communication, which has traditionally focused on the neutral role of interpreters. Some authors believe that this perspective has overlooked the interpreter’s coordinative role (Linell 1997; Wadensjö 1993, 1998). The concept of role set (Sarangi 2011) can contribute to new insights when exploring educational interpreters’ role space: it highlights that professional actors, engaged in face-to-face interaction, are constantly alternating between different responsibilities for which they must use various aspects of their professional knowledge. This study has documented that interpreters take on several roles and responsibilities. Their role spaces are available both frontstage and backstage; this is noticeable in the ways interpreters convey information about the environment, set the scene for backstage clarifications, and coordinate the participants’ interaction. Bearing in mind the findings of the present study, the facilitator model is seen as a good reflection of educational interpreters’ professional practice. These findings are in line with other discourse analysis studies on how sign language interpreters contribute in different ways to establishing and maintaining dialogue (Berge & Raanes 2013; Berge & Thomassen 2015; Herreweghe 2002; Metzger 1999, 2005; Napier 2002; Roy 2000; Warnicke & Plejert 2012). Of additional interest here is the focus on group-work activities in inclusive education, a setting that should be further explored in future research.

References Antia, S. D. & Kreimeyer, K. H. (2001). The role of interpreters in inclusive classrooms. American Annals of the Deaf 146 (4), 355–365. https://doi.org/10.1353/aad.2012.0142 Bagga-Gupta, S. (2004). Visually oriented language use: Discursive and technological resources in Swedish deaf pedagogical arenas. In M. V. Herreweghe & M. Vermeerbergen (Eds.), To the lexicon and beyond: Sociolinguistics in European Deaf communities. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press, 171–207.


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Appendix “text” >text< text↑ (…) ((text)) / “®xxx®”

Transcription key

= direct speech = the person is speaking faster than usual the person is speaking louder than usual pause in speech or signing description of non-verbal activity overlapping talk or actions not identifiable in the audio recording

Author’s address Sigrid Slettebakk Berge Department of Language and Literature Norwegian University of Science and Technology 7491 Trondheim Norway [email protected]

Biographical notes Sigrid Slettebakk Berge is currently affiliated to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where she is part of the Sign Language and Interpreting Education Section in the Department of Language and Literature. She has also worked as an interpreter for the Deaf and Deafblind. She earned her Master’s degree in Educational Science, with a thesis entitled “Interpreter-mediated Action”. Her PhD project was a video-ethnographic classroom study, examining inclusion of deaf senior high school students in interpreter-mediated learning situations.


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How sign language interpreters use multimodal

How sign language interpreters use multimodal

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