The use of IPAD technology to give multi-modal feedback to British Sign Language /English Interpreting undergraduate students

Abstract

Students undertaking the BA Honours British Sign Language/English Interpreting course at the University of Wolverhampton regularly submit video clips to the VLE to be commented on by their tutor and/or their peers. These clips are either of their practise interpretations or presentations delivered in British Sign Language (BSL). This kind of collaborative feedback is extremely valuable in helping students to develop their language skills. The feedback has, historically, been provided in written English. However, this presents a challenge because BSL is a visual language which does not have a standard written format. This case study focuses on the way digital technology has enabled the development of a method of feedback which uses IPAD technology to allow tutors to use audio narration, video modelling and annotation tools to comment upon a student's video clip. This annotated video is then returned to students for viewing. Feedback was sought from students during the early stages of development of this method and this information has been used to make improvements to the feedback format.

Keywords

• British Sign Language
• Interpreting
• feedback
• digital technology
• IPad
• multi modal feedback.