An Expeirmental Study Of The Effect Of Self-assessment On Students’ Tarnslation Learning In Vocational Colleges

According to the basic requirement of Higher Vocational English teaching, theultimate goal of English course is to enable students to read and translate Englishmaterials which are relevant to their majors, with the emphasis on the practicalapplication of the theoretical knowledge in the teaching process. However, in thecurrent translation teaching practice, students generally assume that it is the end oftranslation process when they convert an article in the form of Chinese-Englishtranslation or English-Chinese translation, without knowing how their performance isuntil the teacher correct their translation. Hence, students rarely observe, evaluate andsupervise their translation process, and tend to be passive and in the long run, lack ofenthusiasm in translation learning.Actually, translation was not a linear process from the source language to targetlanguage by a translator, but a process with constant feedback, which is calledself-assessment. In the translation process, a translator needs to modify and polish thetranslation work. On the one hand, self-assessment suggests translator’s satisfactionwith their work; on the other hand, it also shows translator’s efforts to perfect thetranslation. Previous studies claim that students’ participation in assessingthemselves may make the learning atmosphere more challenging and students couldhave a clearer understanding of their learning performance and reflect on themselvesconstantly. However, studies on the application of self-assessment mainly focus onthe teaching of English listening, speaking, writing and reading. Therefore, thepresent author attempts to apply self-assessment training to translation teaching ofhigher vocational college students and testify its feasibility and effectiveness throughan experimental study by answering three questions:1) Can self-assessment arousestudents’ translation interest and confidence?2) Can self-assessment training helpstudents make an effective and reliable assessment for their translation work?3) Can self-assessment training improve students’ translation competence?The author selected two parallel classes as the experimental group and the controlgroup respectively by pre-testing all the112students from three different classes inQi Lu Normal University. The teaching experiment lasted one term, in which theexperimental group students were asked to assess their translation with the help ofself-assessment training; while the control group received no self-assessment training,and students’ translation works were just assessed by teachers. After the teachingexperiment, the post-questionnaire, the post-test and interview were conducted, andthe data collected in the experiment were analyzed with SPSS17.0.The results show that:1) As a supplementary to teacher’ s assessment,self-assessment aroused students’ interests in translation learning, and contributed alot to their confidence and learning autonomy.2) Self-assessment was helpful forstudents to make an effective and reliable assessment for their translation works.3)With the help of self-assessment training, students’ translation competence has beenimproved.Finally, the author elaborated the limitations and problems of the study, and putforward some proposals for further research.