Effect Of English Shadowing Exercise On Improving The Production Of Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting

This thesis explores the effect of English shadowing exercise on improving the production of Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting (SI). Shadowing exercise was first used as a method to test attention in psychological study, and then was introduced by interpreting researchers to analyze whether trainees can transfer what they have heard into oral production. Considering the similarity between shadowing exercise and simultaneous interpreting in the effort model, an increasing number of interpreting researchers pay attention to the role of shadowing exercise in SI training.An overview of research on theories of attention in cognitive psychology is presented in order to help explain the effect of shadowing exercise. The thesis aims to answer following questions:(1) Will trainees pay attention to language features while shadowing materials in the target language?(2) Is shadowing target-language materials beneficial to improving the production of simultaneous interpreting?In order to answer these questions, the research makes a comparison between shadowing and listening. It is hypothesized that compared with listening, shadowing can better help subjects focus their limited mental resources on the auditory input, which will be processed more deeply and kept longer.To prove the hypothesis, an experiment is conducted, in which18graduate students majoring in English Interpreting are randomly divided into two groups, a shadowing group and a listening one. After shadowing or listening to the same English text twice, subjects from each group will interpret a similar Chinese passage into English. After the experiment, every subject will answer a questionnaire, which asks them to highlight those expressions they have noticed while shadowing/listening. The number of expressions highlighted is then counted to explore the two groups’ differences in attention capacity, and to analyze the different processing degrees of attention between the two groups.The above analyses compare shadowing and listening in terms of capacity and processing degrees of attention. In order to demonstrate the effect of shadowing exercise on improving the production of SI, the study further evaluates and compares the quality of subjects’SI production, from the aspects of fluency and overall quality (i.e. message completeness, production fluency, grammar, idiomatic expression and coping capacity).In addition, the questionnaire also lists14factors which will likely benefit from shadowing or listening before interpreting. The subjects are asked to choose whether their performance in the14items they believe have benefited from the exercise. A comparison is then made between the two groups’answers.This is the first empirical study to explore the effect of English shadowing exercise on improving the production of Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting in light of theories of attention in cognitive psychology. Due to methodological limitations, the experimental findings are still in need of corroboration. It is hoped that the findings of the study are suggestive of the direction of future research into the longitudinal study to track the effect of long-term shadowing exercise on SI training.