A Studv On Effects Of The Interpreting Teaching Reform Guided By Social Constructivism

With its advanced theories about knowledge,study and teacher-student relationship,social constructivism has an increasingly important role in guiding the reform of interpreting classes.Guided by this theory,the reformed interpreting classes will be student-oriented.Teachers,as facilitators,will help to create an interpreting environment that resembles real conferences.The effects of the class reform shall be evaluated by students,so that teachers can adjust the direction of the reform based on evaluations.From March to June in 2016,students of three classes from the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation in Beijing Foreign Studies University had their English-Chinese consecutive interpreting class reformed.The guiding theory of this class reform was social constructivism.After the reform,the class included two new tasks:holding mock conferences and discussing homework.New tasks aimed to create an interpreting environment that resembles real conferences and to encourage students to cooperate.In order to evaluate the effects of the reform and put forward some suggestions,the author conducted quantitative and qualitative research.For quantitative research,the author did a questionnaire survey,covering four key elements of the learning process under social constructivism-the teacher,the learner,the task and the context.Based on statistics collected from the survey,interviews were conducted with representatives from survey respondents in an attempt to know the underlying reasons for certain patterns demonstrated in the statistics.