Listening For Interpreting

On entering the 21st century, the development of interpreting theory has received more and more recognition. While in China interpreting studies started to develop quite late. And the early researches focus on empiricism stage, mainly are the oral features and principles of interpreting, the qualification of interpreter and the content of interpreting teaching or something like that. Although interpreting has become a required course in many colleges and universities, according to Liu Heping :"In a long time, the interpreting teaching in many colleges focus on the training of oral English, or the translation of the sentences. Attentions are paid mainly on the imparting of the knowledge, supplied with the development of the competence. The training of the interpreting skills is excluded from the teaching content."(刘和平, 2005) And in the meantime,"the interpreting teaching and research in China are experience-oriented, lacking sufficient scientific research. Persons qualified to teach are rare. What's more, persons engaged in interpreting research are still rarity. Facing up to the working demands for English majors, the interpreting teaching has unveiled a lot of worrying weaknesses."(穆雷,1999) Now, there is a few books on the theory of interpreting teaching in the market, most of which are about the skills of memory, note taking, expressing and analyzing. Scarcely any of them is about the importance of the training of the listening skills in interpreting teaching. In the practice of teaching interpreting course, author finds that many students are unqualified in listening skills before they receive interpreting training, which is due to the fact that not enough attention is paid to listening course in the English teaching programs in Chinese colleges, which in turn seriously influences the effect of the interpreting teaching.This thesis probes into the importance of the listening skills in the interpreting teaching from the perspective of cognition. The thesis hopes to know more about the certain aspects in the process of interpreting by analyzing the existing problems, and thus, get some inspirations from the analysis.This thesis falls into 6 chapters.Chapter one is an introduction stating the status quo of the research in interpreting teaching, and indicating briefly the research methods, purpose, and basic train of thoughts of this thesis. Chapter two puts forward a different view on the phenomena in interpreting teaching that we stress too much on teaching language itself rather than teaching skills, not to mention listening comprehension skills through analyzing the existing problems in interpreting teaching.Chapter three analyzes the listening obstacles in students'language learning and the misconceptions about listening comprehension skills from linguistic and psycholinguistic view.Chapter five highlights the view that only the outcome of advanced listening skill training can form the basis of interpreting training by making a contrastive analysis about different listening comprehension skill levels between the professional interpreters and English majors.Chapter five tries to show that one of the most important reasons accounts for the inconspicuous effect of the interpreting teaching is that many students are unqualified in listening ability before they receive interpreting training, which is due to the fact that not enough attention is paid to listening course in the English teaching programs in Chinese colleges. Therefore, the author calls for the curricular reform of English listening course, by enhancing the its status, and innovating its teaching methods as well as its testing measures, so as to clear away listening obstacles and lay a solid foundation before the students receive interpreting training.Chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis. It discusses the combination of listening skills training and the interpreting teaching in order to improve and enhance the quality of the interpreting teaching. The author proves that if the students can receive some advanced listening comprehension skills training in line with the requirements of interpreting one semester before they have their interpreting course, it will be conducive to the improvement of the effect of the interpreting course.The author wishes that the reader may have a clearer picture of the importance of the listening skills training in interpreting through this thesis. By far, the research in this field is far from enough. The author hopes sincerely this thesis can in any way make up and richen the research in this field. What's more, based on the outcome of the research, the author makes some suggestions for improving the listening comprehension skill training in interpreting teaching. The research is intended to help the teacher to adjust measures to develop students'interpreting skills so as to make contribution to the prosperity of our interpreting personnel market.