A Comparative Study On Peer Assessment Of English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting Between Students Of Different Grades

As an effective supplementary assessment tool and learning tool,peer assessment has received growing attention and is widely used in classroom teaching practice.However,few scholars pay attention to the differences in peer assessment between students of different grades and the influential individual factors behind them.Hence,this study investigates the scoring differences between interpreting students in their peer assessments of Chinese-English interpreting.It also studies the individual factors that may contribute to these differences,with particular emphasis on grade,chronological age,previous assessment experience,and learning styles.In this paper,20 first-year and 18 second-year interpreting students were invited as research participants.Peer assessments were conducted,an individual information form and a learning style inventory were filled at the end of their first semester.After the assessments,data which include the peer-assessed scores and personal information were analyzed and processed with the SPSS 24 software.The results of the study show that:1)the first-year students give higher scores and show more variability than their senior peers;2)students vary wider in their scoring of C-E interpreting than E-C interpreting,and there are significant differences between peer-assessed ratings in terms of TLQuality of both directions and C-E Fluency;3)grade and age cannot significantly explain the variance in the scoring differences,but previous assessment experience could altogether speak 16.3%of the variance in the C-E Fluency.The proportions of variance in C-E and E-C TLQuality and C-E Fluency that peer assessment experience could explain are respectively 18.9%.19.7%.and 10.5%.The learning styles could only explain 11%of the differences in E-C TLQuality.Based on the conclusions above,in the teaching of consecutive interpreting,teachers should reevaluate their perception that first-year students are incompetent to peer-assess others’performance and let them practice this form of assessment as soon as possible.Meanwhile,students’ preferences for different learning styles and corresponding assessment types should be considered during teaching,and instructors ought to introduce more varied assessment tools so that students can accumulate more assessment experience.