Role of interpreting in the inclusion of deaf students in tertiary education in Ghana

This study takes a sociocultural approach to the examination of how interpreters mediate interaction between deaf students and lecturers in tertiary classrooms in Ghana. The majority of deaf students educated in these classrooms underachieve in all courses when compared with their hearing colleagues. However, there is globally a dearth of research investigating the role of interpreters in mediating the interactions in these contexts.
This study adopted a mixed-methods approach to investigate participants’ understandings of inclusion and interpreting. Sixty-six deaf students were surveyed and 33 deaf students, lecturers, interpreters and heads of departments were interviewed one-to-one to provide the context for the study. Ten interpreters were interviewed to ascertain the challenges of interpreting and the management strategies employed in the classrooms. Additionally, videos of interpreters mediating the interaction between deaf students and lecturers in the classrooms were multimodally analysed to establish the participants’ enactment of inclusion for deaf students in tertiary classrooms.
The findings of this study indicated that deaf students had positive expectations and were ready to learn through interpreting in tertiary classrooms. Again, the participants expressed good understandings of inclusion based on their expectations and practices in these contexts. The study also found that interpreters encountered various forms of challenges and employed varied management strategies. Furthermore, lecturers who involved themselves in interpreting promoted more positive classroom interactions than those who didn’t engage in interpreting. Again, interpreters who worked as a team could manage their challenges better and had fewer omissions than interpreters who worked alone irrespective of their proficiencies. Based on these findings recommendations are made for future studies, and a model of inclusion for deaf students is proposed.