Research On Self And Peer Assessment In Business Translation Teaching

In recent years,subject of classroom teaching is changed from “teacher-centered” to “student-centered”,concept of “assessment promoting learning” becomes a heated topic in research field.It is stated by scholars and researchers that modes of assessment and effects of assessment would have an influence on the effectiveness of classroom teaching and students' learning.Translating is an essential skill of language for a comprehensive talent in the global world,especially for a business talent in the present business world.It is being paid more and more attention to by teachers and students.However,the widely applied traditional teacher assessment makes the teaching and learning of translation unsatisfactory.Many problems reveal that teachers are tired of assessing mountains of translating articles,while students complain that the single and boring assessment makes them inactive in classroom activities and ineffective in learning,meanwhile,they feel there is no interaction between teacher and students,student and student.They hope there would be some changes in assessments.Therefore,basing on the learning theories of “Constructivism” and “Cooperative Learning Theory”,the study applied self and peer assessment to the business translation teaching in vocational schools with a purpose to answer the following 2 questions:(1)What are the students' attitudes towards self and peer assessment in business translation teaching?(2)What are the effects of self and peer assessment on students' translating?In order to answer the above 2 questions,the author made a study in business English major in a vocational school in eastern Guangdong region.The study lasted for 18 weeks.The author took 61 students as subjects of the study and divided them into 2 classes randomly.Class A with 30 students was selected to be the control class(CC)while Class B with 31 students was selected to be the experimental class(EC).Before the experiment,a translating exam was held as a pretest to find out the learning levels of the 61 students,and the result of the pretest indicated that there was no obvious difference between CC and EC as their mean scores of the pretest were very close.In the process of the experiment,traditional teacher assessment was applied in CC while self and peer assessment were applied in EC under the teacher's instructions,and students in EC would perform self and peer assessment according to the assessment tables;at the same time,translating tasks,questionnaires,interviews,classroom observations and post-tests were employed to serve the study with a purpose to find out the differences between CC and EC.All the data of tests were analyzed statistically under SPSS24.0.The major findings of the study are as follows:Firstly,self and peer assessment were welcomed and accepted by most vocational school students in this study.They expressed that self and peer assessment had advantages over traditional teacher assessment.Self and peer assessment made them positive in learning,and changed the single,boring and ineffective current translation learning situation.In the process of assessment,they felt enjoyed and serious to assess their own translating articles,to find out their own shortages,and meanwhile,they felt happy and excited to assess their peers' articles,thus,their autonomous learning abilities were being improved gradually.Besides,as the interactions between teacher and students,student and student became active,the atmosphere of translating class became relaxing,to some extent,students' learning interest and motivations were increased.Secondly,self and peer assessment,to certain extent,improved vocational school students' translating.Through the data analysis of pretest and post-test,students' mean scores in EC were higher than that of the CC,and in the perspective of the classroom observations,students' learning enthusiasm was increased,which resulted in their effective learning effects,meanwhile,comparing the quality of translating articles between CC and EC,students in EC were more advantageous than that in CC in word spelling,accumulation of business terms,correctness of grammar,rationality of passage structure,validity of contents,etc.All in all,the study showed that self and peer assessment helped to improve the current teaching situation of business translation in vocational schools;it was also beneficial to improve the students' translating and learning effects.Thus,it proved that self and peer assessment were new modes of assessment accepted by vocational school students and a supplement for traditional teacher assessment.Though,the study also revealed that more time should be needed to complete the process of self and peer assessment in business translation teaching,the teaching effects were obvious and valuable.At last,the author got some suggestions from the study to improve the future teaching of business translation in vocational schools.