Spanish & Illinois

by Ann Abbott Yesterday I gave a talk at the Law School here at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It was for a meeting of the Immigration Law Society, a group of students interested in immigration law. I built the slides and the information on a talk I gave earlier this semester to the interpreters in the Champaign school district. Here are my slides: Interpreting: Language, Culture and Ethics by AnnAbbott If you would like for me to speak to your group about this, you can reach out to me at arabbott@illinois.edu or 217-333-6714. I was very interested in the student questions afterward. Some asked for more detail about ad hoc intepreting, but a lot of students were interested in knowing more about how to improve their language skills. For people who feel that their second language is rusty, I suggested doing a lot of listening and reading (input); then they can find opportunities to practice speaking. If you're watching movies or binging on Casa de Papel on...

by Kelly Klus Parent Teacher Conferences This past week, some Spanish students from the University of Illinois went to Central High School in Champaign to volunteer as interpreters for Spanish speaking families during parent teacher conferences. This was an awesome opportunity for us- and it was pretty tough! My overwhelming thought while we were having these conversations is how difficult and frustrating it would be as a parent to not be able to communicate directly with the adults that spend the entire day with their kids. Not being able to communicate successfully with your child’s teachers could create a dependency on the child as a sole communicator of what is going on at school. I imagine it would also be very difficult for parents to know what questions to ask or expectations to have if they themselves had never been to high school, or had been to high school in another country. Parent-teacher conferences can be emotionally intense; both parents and teachers want the...