Педагогические науки/ 2. Проблемы подготовки специалистов

к.ф.н., доцент Шингарева М.Ю., к.ф.н., доцент Тасанбаева З.Р.

Академический инновационный университет, Шымкент

DEVELOPING INSTRUCTIONAL MODELS IN INTERPRETER TRAINING PROGRAMS

Education in an academic setting, whether in the traditional university or professional school, is based upon the premise that training is not a haphazard process and that reflection on the nature of skill acquisition is beneficial to the student. Interpreter education may be regarded as the acquisition of a high-performance skill that is subject to the general dynamics of skill acquisition widely observed in other domains (Schneider 1985).

The participants in any program of instruction are part of a larger community of professional practice that is subject to its own social dynamics. Thus, introductory courses for interpretation or translation have the initiation of the learner in this community as one of their primary tasks. They provide a forum in which students can become acquainted with the profession and the workplace by introducing the learner to the skill in a reflective context.

One theoretical construct that has emerged in the context of professional communities is distributed intelligence. According to Bruner, “[t]he gist of the idea is that it is a grave error to locate intelligence in a single head” (1996:154).

In interpreter education, distributed intelligence can be leveraged for learning through the creation of second-order environments, which Bereiter and Scardamalia define as “ones in which the conditions ...change progressively as a result of the successes of other people in the environment” (1993:106). Ongoing adaptation to these changing conditions is required of all participants.

Although leading interpreter education programs are situated in an academic environment, interpreter training has never truly left the realm of apprenticeship. Apprenticeship in some form was an important means of acquiring the skills and abilities necessary to interpret for centuries before the introduction of formalized training (Caminade & Pym 1998:281). Most professional interpreters continue to be wary of distancing training from the apprenticeship mode, in which practical skills training takes precedence over the scholarly acquisition of abstract knowledge.

In addressing the relationship between theory and practice in skill acquisition, Bruner makes the following general statement:

[P]raxis most typically precedes nomos in human history (and, I would add, in human development). Skill to put it another way, is not a “theory” informing action. Skill is a way of dealing with things, not a derivation from theory. Doubtless, skill can be improved with the aid of theory, as when we learn about the inside and outside edges of our skis, but our skiing doesn’t improve until we get that knowledge back into the skill of skiing. Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits. (1996:152)

In his conceptualization of reflective practice, Donald Schön (1987) proposes an approach to teaching that takes into account this fundamental relationship between praxis and nomos - the relationship between acquisition of skill for professional practice and structured, orderly theory-building. In a reflective practicum - “a setting designed for the learning of a practice” (1987:37) - collaborative learning through knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection on reflection-in-action is the objective. Reflection-in-action refers to the fact that we may reflect on action, thinking back on what we have done in order to discover how our knowing-in-action may have contributed to an unexpected outcome. More importantly, in the construction of knowledge, reflection-in-action has a critical function, questioning the assumptional structure of knowing-in-action. We think critically about the thinking that got us into this fix or this opportunity; and we may, in the process, restructure strategies of action, understandings of phenomena, or ways of framing problems ... Reflection gives rise to on-the-spot experiment. We think up and try out new actions intended to explore the newly observed phenomena, test our tentative understandings of them, or affirm the moves we have invented to change things for the better. (Schön 1987:28)

Similar to the process described metaphorically by Klein and Hoffman in Expertise Studies as learning to see the invisible, reflective practice sharpens perceptual skills, which enables learners “to make more rapid and accurate judgments about the nature of the situations they are in” when executing innate skills (1993:215).

In his discussion of curricula for interpreter and translator training programs, Freihoff advocates an approach to instruction in which students learn to analyze their performance and relate their progress in learning to the goals of the program. He regards self-diagnosis and self-correction in the foreign language as particularly important, as students will not always have access to instructors and native speakers and must learn to judge the quality of their performance independently (1993:210). The ability to make these types of distinctions empowers the student, which is an underlying objective of reflective practice.

In the interpretation classroom, Kurz stresses the need to place “emphasis on confronting students with life-like situations” and advocates the use of videotapes in instruction to complement mock conferences and guest speakers (1989:213). For translation, situated cognition implies that “instead of focusing on formal and functional equivalents for isolated elements in the text, the instructor could set the stage for realistic translation by offering real or simulated information to the students about the translation situation in which it had occurred” (Kiraly 1997a:148). These teaching methods can be utilized in the traditional interpretation classroom and also in the framework of a reflective practicum, in which students are responsible for the organization and staffing of interpreted events.

Cognition is therefore situated with varying degrees of authenticity vis-а-vis the professional world in the settings in which individual events of instruction occur. This does not necessarily imply that there is a single or “ideal” instructional format that is of particular value in conference interpreter education, however. While exposure to conferences and conference simulations is vital to interpreter training, complementary instructional formats may also be utilized to add experiential value and maximize learning outcomes.

Klein and Hoffman (1993) distinguish between four types of experiences that contribute to the evolution of expertise: personal, directed, manufactured, and vicarious experiences. Different instructional formats lend themselves to these experiences; for example, an educational setting can differ from the workplace in that it can be structured to provide greater task exposure within a limited timeframe and concurrently target a range of specific subtasks.

Personal experiences are usually gained in the workplace, i.e., are equivalent to learning on the job by doing the job, which Klein and Hoffman describe as “straightforward, but inefficient” (1993:215).

In other words, if personal experiences were all that is necessary, formal training would be superfluous. Similarly, Schneider identifies the idea that one should always train in the format of the total task as a widespread fallacy of training high-performance skills (1985).

Directed experiences involve one-on-one tutoring, mainly through an apprenticeship in the workplace, which entails access to the field, e.g., conferences, courts, and/or hospitals. Directed experiences provide opportunity for the “observation of performance, assessment, modeling, guiding motivation and attitudes, relieving anxiety, and developing a professional identity” (Klein & Hoffman 1993:216).

In contrast, manufactured experiences are provided in the classroom. To be particularly effective, manufactured experiences provide highly concentrated training by exposing the student to tough cases, preferably through simulations of the workplace.

Finally, the “use of vicarious experiences treats expertise as a resource” (ibido 219), as the expert engages in storytelling from the field. “For example, stories are accounts of the experiences of others and are often sufficiently vivid to serve as additions to the experience base” (ibido 217). A goal of interpreter educators could be to remove the anecdotal from storytelling and leverage their professional knowledge by relating their practical experience systematically to classroom tasks. In this respect, vicarious experiences can be used to develop instructional modules similar to case studies.

Therefore, knowledge gained from the study of expertise indicates that training programs benefit by including all four types of learning experiences. A combination of personal, manufactured, directed and vicarious experiences can be achieved by offering a range of instructional events, e.g., classroom instruction, internships in the workplace, and reflective practica (de Terra & Sawyer 1998). The attainment of a synthesis of learning experiences and instructional events that are clearly related to curriculum goals is a hallmark of effective curriculum design.

Bibliography

1. Schneider, Walter. Training high-performance skills: Fallacies and guidelines. Human Factors, N 27(3), 1985.

2. Bruner, Jerome. The Culture of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

3. Bereiter, Carl & Scardamalia, Marlene. Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise. Chicago: Open Court, 1993.

4. Caminade, Monique & Pym, Anthony. Translator-training institutions/ Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

5. Schön, Donald A. Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987.

6. Klein, Gary A. & Hoffman, Robert R. Seeing the invisible: Perceptual-cognitive aspects of expertise/Cognitive Science Foundations of Instruction. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993.

7. Kurz, Ingrid. The use of videotapes in consecutive and simultaneous training/ The Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Teaching Conference Interpretation. Udine: Campanotto Editore, 1989.

8. Kiraly, Donald C. In search of new pathways for translator education. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997.

9. de Terra, Diane & Sawyer, David B. Educating interpreters: The role of reflection in training. AT A Chronicle, N27 (3), 1998.