A Study On Needs Analysis Of Listening Part In Interpretation

China's deep reforming and opening to the outside of the world needs interpretation to facilitate communication between people speaking different languages. Therefore, there has been an increasingly growing number of candidates for interpretation, who are either training themselves or receiving training either at college or in specialized institutions.Interpretation has been discussed a lot in the academic field. Mainly, a lot of researches have been done on standards of interpretation and its theory, strategies in interpretation, teaching book design, and teaching methodologies. However, there is still some room for further investigation. Most of the researches are empirical ones, and subjects in the previous researches are interpreters of high level language proficiency such as professional interpreters, while few researches have interpreter candidates as their researching subjects. There are even fewer researches on listening in interpretation. But as is known to all, listening is the basis for interpretation. Without a good and accurate listening, interpretation can not be accomplished. Also, since listening in interpretation belongs to English for Specific Purposes, it can be affected by a lot of factors as have been researched previously by many researchers, such as one's linguistic knowledge and use of learning strategies, etc. But what are the factors that might contribute to the breakdown of interpretation and which strategies the interpreter candidates need most for successful interpretation? This has aroused the researcher's interest, and the study on interpreter candidates'listening in interpretation is thus under way.The study first presents some related theories on English for Specific Purposes and needs analysis, and then it gives a detailed analysis of features of listening in interpretation. The subjects are 86 interpreter candidates, of whom 36 are from the Internet, and 30 English majors in Grade three from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and 20 are college students studying in different majors in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, too. The questionnaire and interview have been used for the study. With the help of SPSS 10.0, the thesis makes factor analysis, correlation analysis, and Chi-Square Tests. The research findings show that among the factors that affect interpretation, non-linguistic knowledge comes first which mainly refers to psychological status and learning strategies. The learning strategies are the second factor that might affect interpretation. While among the learning strategies to be used in interpretation, it is agreed that in interpretation, notes-taking, labeling, induction, and anticipation all play a part. Then comes the linguistic knowledge, particularly at the syntactic level, the understanding of long and complex sentences and complex substitutes of one sentence have been a big headache for most of the interpreter candidates. The results from the interview validate the conclusion drawn from the questionnaire about the factors that might affect listening in interpretation and the use of learning strategies. As for the attitudes towards the necessity and importance of listening in interpretation, a consensus has been reached. Based on the study, the thesis offers some pedagogical implications as well as limitations for the study and points out the direction for future research.