The Application Of Cooperative Learning To Interpreting Teaching

Interpreting is the extempore and faithful oral reproduction in one language of what is said in another language. It is seen as a bilingual or multilingual cross-cultural communicative activity, with the interpreter serving as the medium for successful or efficient communication among parties concerned.With the development of China's opening up to the world and the increasing frequency of international exchange, the interpretation profession is becoming more and more important, and the study of interpreting teaching is arousing more and more attention. Previous research has demonstrated that there exist many serious and burning problems in current interpretation teaching, such as: few chances for practice and lack of scientific teaching approaches. In order to improve the current interpretation-teaching situation, the author believes that a new teaching approach, which is effective in interpreting teaching, is worth of inquiring into.Cooperative learning (CL) refers to a learner-centered method of instruction whereby students work together in groups to reach common goals. Evolved from America in the early 1970's, now CL has been a theoretical and strategic system applied by many countries in the world. Within cooperative learning, active participation and interaction are encouraged. Generally, students take more responsibility in the learning process, and have more chances to practice in a positive learning atmosphere with enthusiastic attitude.Taking the present interpretation-teaching situation and the characteristics of CL into consideration, the author tries to apply CL approach into interpretation teaching, and to find out whether CL approach is effective or not in improving students'interpreting competence. Therefore, the thesis is mainly concerned with an experimental research examining the effectiveness of CL in interpreting teaching. Started from September 2010, 63 junior students from two classes of English Department, Rizhao Polytechnic were chosen as subjects for a sixteen-week research. Class 1 with 32 students was sampled as the experimental group, which was exposed to CL approach; Class 2 with 31 students as the control group received traditional teacher-centered instruction. The two classes were chosen because they were proved to have no significant difference in their academic achievements, learning motivation, learning interest and learning habit.To collect effective data and ensure the validity, this research employs the following instruments: two tests (a pre-test and a post-test), two questionnaires (a pre-questionnaire and a post-questionnaire), classroom observation and interviews. The data collected are processed with the help of SPSS17.0 and Excel. Results and analysis of the data indicate that CL is an effective and productive teaching strategy in interpretation teaching with a great variety of benefits. By providing students with more opportunities of interpreting practice, CL can improve students'class involvement and interpreting competence greatly. Furthermore, as a learner-centered and creativity-oriented approach, CL increases students'interpreting learning initiative and autonomy, and creates a more favorable interpreting learning environments, in which students'motivation, interests and confidence were improved considerably. Besides the vast benefits, this thesis also discovers some problems which may probably occur and negatively influence the implementation of CL, and some practical strategies are proposed to tackle them. In conclusion, CL is highly effective and productive in interpretation teaching. In order to make CL widely applicable in interpreting teaching, some further research needs to be conducted.