Confidence in your interpreting skills and a connection to your work can enhance your process, progress, and outcomes. Unfortunately, interpreters often focus on negatives, leading to disconnection and reduced confidence. This self-paced course introduces confidence and self-efficacy concepts, offering a framework for assessing your work. It provides guided practice in assessment and pattern identification, aiming to boost your confidence and self-efficacy in these skills, ultimately improving your understanding and performance.

This course helps aspiring and working interpreters enhance their use of cohesion and prosody, crucial linguistic features for message coherence and guiding receivers to the message's meaning and intent. Both ASL and English use various devices to create cohesion and prosody, which will be explored through text analysis and applied in ASL to English and English to ASL interpretations. Research shows novice interpreters often struggle with these features, affecting consumer perception and message accuracy. Participants will study this research to understand the importance of improving cohesion and prosody skills for better interpretation quality.

This course is designed for aspiring and working interpreters to enhance their comprehension of ASL narratives for interpreting into spoken English. It targets individuals with emerging ASL comprehension skills aiming for mastery. Participants will analyze ASL narratives through structured activities, including advance preparation, slower text viewing, and linguistic feature analysis. They will answer questions, summarize messages, and use an answer key for self-correction. The course includes presentations on ASL comprehension topics and offers practice in interpreting ASL to spoken English, with comparisons to certified interpreters' samples. Resources for continued skill development are provided.

This course enhances interpreters’ visual-spatial communication skills to better include deaf students in classroom content. It addresses the challenge of replicating teachers’ use of media and visual aids, often leading to incomplete information for deaf students. Participants will explore the historical and modern roles of interpreters, focusing on the Role Space concept in K-12 settings. The course includes practice activities, self-assessments, and comparisons with certified interpreters’ work. It concludes with resources for ongoing skill development and assesses learning through pre- and post-tests.

Interpreters mediate between cultures and languages, particularly ASL/English interpreters who bridge Deaf culture and American mainstream culture. They navigate subcultures within the Deaf community and broader American society, and even global cultures. Linguistically, they mediate between American spoken/written English and ASL, considering various dialects, accents, and regional variations. This professional development module aims to equip interpreters with strategies and tactics for handling culturally and linguistically induced information (CII/LII) during interpretation.

This course highlights the responsibilities of interpreters in reducing the visual demands on Deaf students in hearing classrooms. Unlike hearing students who can simultaneously look at a stimulus and listen to the teacher, Deaf students face multiple visual demands. They must watch the interpreter while also looking at the stimulus, locating materials, viewing visual aids, reading, writing, or participating in activities. These competing demands can be overwhelming. Although teachers are often willing to adjust, they may revert to old habits, complicating the Deaf student’s experience.

To fully benefit from professional skill development, signed language interpreters need confidence in their abilities. However, many struggle with fears and feelings of inadequacy, which hinder their progress. This course aims to help interpreters understand the mind’s impact on readiness for mentoring and skill development, providing practical strategies to boost confidence and comfort. It addresses negative self-talk by offering opportunities for self-reflection and effective strategies to overcome self-imposed limitations, fostering a mindset shift towards embracing progress over perfection.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is crucial for signed language interpreters’ professional development, as it involves recognizing and attributing emotions and mental states to oneself and others. These skills, developing from infancy through language exposure, are intertwined with communication, learning, and problem-solving. ToM significantly impacts social and academic functioning. Research on ToM skills in deaf and hard of hearing students highlights the interpreter’s role in bridging language and comprehension gaps. Understanding ToM helps assess and support communication breakdowns, enhancing students’ language and academic development. This presentation will explore ToM’s foundation, its relationship with language and communication, and practical applications for educational interpreters and students.