Developed by Stokoe (2014) to train professionals working in communication-rich contexts like hospitals and tribunals, the Conversation Analytic Role-Play Method (CARM) takes research findings as a basis for training. It uses anonymised extracts from authentic conversations, recorded in situ as part of the daily work of institutions, to enable trainees to learn from what happens.
Over the last decade, CARM has been used in Dialogue Interpreting (Niemants/Stokoe 2012; Wadensjö 2014) and can prove beneficial to train interpreting students (IS) and trainers, as well as practising interpreters and service providers (Niemants et al. forthcoming).
I will here focus on IS in higher education and argue that CARM may be suitable not only for language specific courses involving single language pairs, but also for monolingual courses such as the one introduced at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (University of Bologna) in 2020. The aim of this 30-hour course is to foster discussion on relevant theory, starting from the practice of interpreters in e.g. healthcare consultations, asylum-seeking interviews, and business meetings, thereby preparing the theoretical ground of 32 IS before they start their additional 20-hour role-play exercises per language pair in smaller groups.
My presentation will show how IS enter the healthcare setting: through the multimodal analysis of video recordings collected in 2022, I will explain how I play extracts synchronized with the transcripts, stop them at relevant choice points and ask IS to produce the next turn/action, collecting some alternatives and discussing their potential consequences before playing what is coming next. I will also show how I deepen some of the issues raised through CARM by asking subgroups of IS to read, discuss and then share with the class the key points of some written materials, or by doing multilingual role-plays. To document IS's immediate perceptions and changes with respect to this setting, I will present the results of a pre and post-questionnaire. I will conclude on the main outcomes of a focus group involving IS who attended the course in 2020 and then started working in local healthcare institutions. My aim is to show how, and to what extent, CARM helps IS get to know a professional community and build up relevant skills and competencies before they actually enter the communication- and interpreting-rich institution this community works in.
Niemants, N., Stokoe, E. (2017) "Using CARM in healthcare interpreter education" in Teaching Dialogue Interpreting: Research-based proposal for higher education, L. Cirillo & N. Niemants (eds). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins: 293–321.
Niemants, N., Hansen, J., Stokoe, E. (frth) "The Conversation Analytic Role-Play Method: How authentic data meet simulations for interpreter training" in Routledge Handbook on Public Service Interpreting, L. Gavioli & C. Wadensjö (eds.)
Stokoe, E. (2014) "The Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM): A Method for Training Communication Skills as an Alternative to Simulated Role-play", Research on Language and Social Interaction 47(3): 255–65.
Wadensjö, C. (2014) "Perspectives on Role-Play: Analysis, Training and Assessments", The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 8(3): 437–51.
