Discoursing ‘dis course: applying discourse analysis in an undergraduate signed language interpreting course

In this paper, we explore a strategy for teaching undergraduate American Sign Language/English interpreting students about discourse types and genre boundaries. To do so, we describe a project-based learning approach employed with a cohort of second-year students, detail the assessment method, and analyze students’ work. Specifically, the project required students to read a scholarly paper in the field of Interpreting Studies and create an American Sign Language video-recorded reformulation of the paper in a different discourse genre (e.g., a television news broadcast or a product infomercial). The findings indicate that, despite exhibiting a concerning lack of American Sign Language proficiency, students demonstrated remarkable creativity and critical thinking abilities. Students created video-recorded reformulations that incorporated salient points from their assigned articles while also applying principles of discourse analysis learned throughout the semester. Taken together, the findings suggest that applied discourse analysis projects and inter-genre reformulation activities can be used as a part of valuable pre-translation and translation training