This conference is aimed at Educational Support Staff who serve as Auslan interpreters in classrooms, to improve interpreting in classrooms thus learning outcomes for deaf students. The conference program will be divided into two half day sessions. 

Firstly with “The role classroom interpreting has in interacting with language and cognitive development” delivered by Professor Brenda Schick.  Professor Shick’s presentation will examine the role of the classroom interpreter and how this impacts and influences deaf students who have language and cognitive developmental challenges, and how current developments impact the use of sign language in classrooms. 

Sally Strobridge will discuss the need to develop instructional strategies that enable rich, multimodal and multi-lingual learning environments in science and maths classes with “Signing scientifically and mathematically”. The classroom interaction is a process of multimodal meaning in scientific and mathematical practice, therefore, developing a dialogue with the students in the bilingual science classroom implies some challenges. This workshop will focus on how to use depicting signs, personification, space and constructed actions to present scientific and mathematical concepts not ‘signs for each term’.  

This conference is delivered in partnership with the Victorian Deaf Education Institute.  

Participants will learn:

• the important role depicting signs in Auslan have for making joint meaning in learning science and mathematics
• to discuss meta-linguistic issues with students to develop an appropriate register
• to discuss what it means to communicate scientific and mathematical concepts, terms and models in the written English through Auslan