Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Rationale
Considering China’s more frequent international exchanges with other countriesand the inter-culture communication around the world, there is no surprise to notice thathighly qualified interpreters have been badly in need. Those interpreters work as the themediators between different languages and cultures and play very important roles ininternational communication. It is under such circumstances that China EducationMinistry has issued the decree that interpretation teaching should be the compulsorycourse in many universities. Thus, now the cultivation of highly qualified interpretersare mostly counts on the teaching of interpreting in universities which has drawnscholars’ attention. The previous studies mainly focus on interpreting modals such asGile’s interpreting modal and Xiamen University’s Communicative Model ofInterpreting. They ignore to combine interpreting practices with interpreting theories.Other studies mainly focus on the introduction of theories at home and from abroad andpay little attention to the actual problems existed in the instructional practices. Afterinvestigating the current situation and figuring out the existing problems in presentinterpreting teaching, this thesis attempts to find out effective ways to help furtherenhance students’ interpreting abilities and make great improvements in Englishinterpreting teaching.In view of these, the thesis, under the guidance of the methodology and frameworkof Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), attempts to conduct an empirical study toprove that Multimodal interpreting teaching instruction could help students to betteracquire interpreting skills. Thus, the thesis could provide suggestions for the teaching ofEnglish Interpreting course and in hope of improving students’ interpreting abilities.
……..
1.2 Research Objectives
Nowadays, interpretation course, either optional or compulsory, is offered forEnglish major students in their third and fourth year of campus study in manyuniversities across China. The most related issue is the teaching of English interpreting.Although it has been noticed and studied for years and many scholars and universitieshave already realized the importance of interpreting and its teaching and paid greatattention, there are still many problems. Among many of the reasons, inappropriateteaching method is the main reason. Traditional interpreting teaching method pays toomuch attention to the introduction of interpreting theories and ignores the requirementsof practicing and learning interpreting before and after class. What is worse, someteachers even use the method of teaching translation or listening to teach interpretingwhich may mislead the students and cause students’ loss of learning interests ininterpreting. Considering the currently in use and flawed interpreting teaching method,proper teaching measures should be put forward to make improvements in interpretingteaching quality.Inspired by theory of Multimodal Discours
……….
Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Overview of Undergraduate Interpreting Teaching
Zhong Shukong (1984) believes that interpretation can not be regarded as a merelylinguistic undertaking, but should be viewed as an aspect of a larger domain, namely,that of communication. Mei Deming (2002, p.7) defines interpreting as a kind ofcommunicative activity transmitting one language to another language accurately andquickly through the oral form in order to exchange information, which is a kind ofcommunicative tool on which man depends in the course of cross-cultural activitiesamong all kinds of nationals. Tian Jianguo (1985, p. 107) holds that interpreting is aspecial verbal activity promoting the oral communication among the people withdifferent language. Seleskovitch (1998, p. 61) alleges that interpreting is communication,i.e, analysis of original and its conversion into a form accessible to the listener.Since different scholars define and characterize their object of study according totheir own particular aims, interests and experiences, the basic question about the natureof interpreting has come to greatly different answers. The author of this thesis standswith professor Mei Deming, because his definition covers all important factors ofinterpreting. Thus, the author comes to a conclusion that interpreting means the oraltransfer of meaning quickly and accurately from one language into another to reach thegoal of oral communication among those people who do not share the same languagebut need to communicate and share different information.
……….
2.2 Previous Studies on Interpreting Teaching
In interpreting teaching, the time from the 1960s to the 1970s is called theexperimental psychology period. During that time, a lot of psychological theories wereapplied to interpreting teaching which mainly concentrated on four aspects ofinterpreting: first of all, the typical expressions and terminologies in specificinterpreting occasions; secondly, the strategies in interpreting proverbs, quotations andnumbers; then, the training of interpreting note-taking; fourthly, the practice on the“chunking” process. In China, linguists also focus on those four aspects. For example,the famous scholar Bao Xiaoying (2005) focus on the studies of the third item---thetraining of interpreting note-taking. In How to Help Students to Achieve ‘Reliability’ inInterpreting---the Application of Cognitive Psychology in Interpreting Teaching, BaoXiaoying (2005) made researches based on Miller’s (1956) theory that chunking of theinformation in memory is effective to combat the limitation of short-term memory, sincechunking information can stay longer than those fragmentary information units in theshort-term memory as well as lessen information lost. Based on the InformationProcessing Theory, she concentrated on the combination of short-term memory inpsychology with the interpreting teaching and made a thorough discussion on twoquestions: firstly, what role did memory unit play when receiving interpretinginformation; secondly, is taking notes during interpreting necessary. In the end, BaoXiaoying (2005) answered the questions that memory unit should be “chunking” inwhich every single sentence in paragraphs could be a memory unit and differentsegments in very complicated sentences should be the memory unit and taking notesduring real interpreting is indispensable. Besides, she proved that it is helpful to helpstudents gain ‘reliability’ in their interpreting by applying the theory of informationprocess to teach interpreting.
………
Chapter Three Theoretical Basis.........34
3.1 Constructivist Learning Environment…........34
3.2 MDA and Undergraduate Interpreting Teaching.………....39
3.3 Representation of CLE and MDA in Undergraduate Interpreting Teaching......42
Chapter Four Methodology…….........49
4.1 Research Questions…………..........49
4.2 Research Design…………........49
4.3 Method…………........50
Chapter Five Results and Discussion.........55
5.1 Results ..........55
5.2 Discussion.....61
5.3 Summary.......65
Chapter Five Results and discussions
As a detailed account of the design of teaching experiment has been made in thechapter four, this chapter will deal with the results from the interpreting teachingexperiment. The analysis of final exam scores of last semester of the five classes and theselection of the experimental group and control group after careful comparison are totest students of two groups are at the same level of their interpreting ability. Thus, thevalidity and reliability of the experiment are guaranteed and the results would be moreconvincible. In the final test after three month’ interpreting learning, the total score ofeach students’ interpreting test is marked from and is the sum of three indices, which arethe completeness, fluency and language. As all the students’ scores in the final test werecollected, the data obtained from interpreting test and information from thequestionnaire were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively with the help of SPSS 16.0to answer the research questions and the results would be reported in full length in thefollowing section.
………..
Conclusion
In this thesis, firstly the author gives a brief introduction to present situation ofundergraduate interpreting teaching in China. Then various views of MDA are reviewedand perspective and theories of CLE are introduced as the theoretical foundation. Afterthat, a scientific interpreting teaching experiment is conducted by the author in twoclasses and the results get from the tests of the experiment are analyzed closely whichindicates that teaching interpreting in a multimodal based way would greatly helpstudents improve their interpreting ability. On the basis of the previous parts, this lastchapter comes to make a conclusion of the whole thesis which consists of four parts.The author would firstly summarize the major findings of this thesis based on theanalytical results of the experiment. Then some pedagogic implications are deducedfrom the experiment for the teaching of English interpreting in universities and thelimitations of the present study and suggestions for future studies both on interpretingteaching and MDA are stated.
…………
Reference (omitted)
