Facilitating Legitimate Peripheral Participation for Student Sign Language Interpreters in Medical Settings

The chapter explores student interpreters' learning of medical interpreting within a situated learning context that necessarily includes senior interpreters, senior healthcare practitioners, and deaf community members. Learning within this community of practice exposes students to the multimodal nature of sign-language interpreter-mediated interaction, including co-speech and no-speech gestures, linguistic and non-linguistic communicative actions, and the use of environmental tools and the situated use of language and interaction. Situated learning within the clinical-skills lab enables legitimate peripheral participation that closely emulates the authentic interpreting task. Data from roleplays based on a clinical-skills lab are analysed and examples are identified to show that student interpreters are driven by notions of language, rather than communication fidelity. The multimodal nature of the interaction within the situated learning environment facilitates the students' exposure to and learning of situationally driven interpreting choices.