Student Interpreters' Accuracy In Self-assessment And Its Correlation With Their Interpreting Performance:A Case Study

Self-assessment refers to the process and results of student judging their own learning performance and learning outcome.It has proved to be a valuable method in math,medicine and sports programs of helping students to direct energies to specific dimensions and yield sustained improvement.The prerequisite of effective self-assessment is whether students can accurately identify their strength,weakness and mistakes in learning performance and learning outcome.For graduate students in interpreting training programs,most of the training programs are for two years.Due to limited resources,students in these programs find it difficult to receive much one-on-one coaching from teachers in interpreting practices.Without frequent and in-depth communication with teachers,students must practice and assess interpreting on their own to screen mistakes and weaknesses so that they may correct them in time and make progress.Therefore,there is a strong need for student interpreters to accurately assess themselves.Though student interpreters are in need of assessing themselves accurately in interpreting exercises,there are few studies demonstrating whether students have such an ability in real practice.The author investigates if graduate students in China's interpreting training program can accurately assess their interpreting performance by comparing student interpreters'self-assessment with teachers'assessment and if there is any correlation between the accuracy degree of self-assessment with their interpreting performanceThe results show that most student interpreters participating in the study can assess their interpreting performances to an accurate degree;but the accuracy degree clearly varies.Students winning higher scores from teachers are judged as better in performing the interpreting task than those receiving lower scores.