Teaching Chinese Reading Comprehension To Spanish-Speaking Students Of Translation

Research in translation indicates that reading is an essential part of the translation process; if a translator cannot understand the original text he will not be able to translate it. The main subject of this thesis is related to the teaching of Chinese reading comprehension to translation students. As Chinese is the second foreign language translation students choose, they start to study it from the beginner’s level. For that reason they have a very limited time to improve their language level before they start translating texts from Chinese into Spanish. During this learning process one of the skills they need to develop as quickly as possible is reading.This teaching is influenced by different factors:the characteristics of the language, the educational context and the teaching and learning process. The purpose of this thesis is to propose a teaching model for reading comprehension in Chinese-Spanish translation studies relating the above mentioned factors.In order to do it we have divided this thesis in five chapters. The first chapter describes readers’ profiles, teaching reading comprehension methodologies, reading strategies and exercises that help to improve reading skills. It also presents our reading model. The second chapter focuses on learning theories, conceptions of language and language learning, methods of language teaching and the teaching of foreign languages with specific purposes. The third chapter analyzes the way Chinese is taught in China and in Spain, the contents of the curriculum and the textbooks in use. The fourth chapter focuses on the way reading comprehension is taught in China, the research that has been done on that area and the textbooks used. The fifth and last chapter introduces the educational context that serves as framework for the teaching of Chinese language at university in Spain analyzes different translation processes and relates one of them with our reading process. Finally, it presents our teaching model for reading comprehension in Chinese for translation students.