An Inter-Disciplinary Approach To Enhancing Listening Comprehension In Interpreting

No man is an island, as John Donne remarked centuries ago. Today, as cooperation and co-relation between disciplines assumes an ever-increasing significance, Interpreting Studies are thriving by leaps and bounds following the paths paved by more mature sciences like psychology, cognitive science, linguistics and communication. This thesis therefore attempts to probe into the shared field of interest—listening through an inter-disciplinary approach and apply the results and findings of these older disciplines to this relatively young one—interpreting. The author has drawn inspirations from some of the most prestigious scholars of each field to expound on the process and obstacles of listening as well as strategies to enhance listening. Those findings may serve as excellent guidance in interpreting studies. This thesis however does not purport to be an exhaustive research on inter-disciplinary study of interpreting. It merely singles out one component.The author was first inspired to deal at length with listening by the AIIC conventional wisdom in directionality. Controversial as the issue still is, the overarching importance of listening is never in doubt; indeed effective listening is the best way to transcend the limitations of directionality. The relationship of cognitive and auditory processes revealed by scientific advances has attached even greater importance to listening which forms the main content of Chapter one. Exploring the famous Ellis and Young psycholinguistic model proposed in 1988 pinpointing detailed components of the language processing system, the author discovered to her amazement that the model provided answers for far more than the listening process. Listening was also dissected through a communicative perspective in Chapter two, where permeates the author's own analysis and theoretical support from gurus of each field. In Chapter three, psychology has taken the stage to exhibit its magical charms to help reduce apprehension. Chapter four then combines the results of previous chapters and proposes ways of enhancing listening skills through linguistic and communicative perspective. Chapter five wraps up the thesis.The excruciating difficulties of gathering representative evidence from experienced interpreters have prevented the author from writing an all-encompassing thesis about directionality who has chosen instead to write on listening with an aim to audaciously carve our a path in the uncharted territory for interpreting learners and help them transcend directionality, and to inspire more researchers to enlighten the field of directionality and delve into inter-disciplinary research on Interpreting Studies.