Reflective approach to prospective philologists’ translation competence assessment

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Reflective approach to prospective philologists' translation competence assessment

Korol T.

Efficient assessment implementation into teaching activity of any type, including translation, provides its practical success and productivity. Consequently, it should be based on the sufficient theoretical framework, namely on the set of approaches contributing to its coherence, integrity and functionality within wider educational context. This article defines the prospects of reflective approach application to assessment arrangement and realization in prospective philologists ' university training. In this key, it has been considered in the relation to the leading contemporary theoretical approaches to translation training and assessment. Its content has been thoroughly analysed, key concepts have been defined, dominant provisions and principles have been singled out and commented on. The prospective ways of its deployment in the process of assessment realization in translation training have been outlined.

Reflective approach to translation training and assessment is being developed and implemented within the student- centred and process-oriented educational paradigm. In this research, it is treated as a derivative or subsidiary one from social constructivist approach, which dominates in contemporary prospective philologists ' training. Reflective approach scaffolds and supports student's active role and position in the process of new knowledge construction and application, responsible drilling, formation and enhancement of sufficient translation skills and strategies through conscious acquisition and employment of relevant reflective actions by the students. They involve objective review, constructive consideration and critical awareness of the translation and training processes, as well as the received translation products, training outcomes (both borderline and final) aimed at their timely correction and required optimization. In this context, self-assessment grows in its importance transforming into the most productive and mature form of assessment in translation training. It should be operationalized with the help of specifically developed, selected and applied assessment tools and procedures.

Key words: assessment in translation training, translation competence level, prospective philologists, reflective approach, reflective actions, metacognitive strategies, self-monitoring, reflection tools.

Assessment is an essential part of any training process irrelevant of its focus, so translation training is not an exception. A well-developed and well-implemented translation competence assessment system allows teachers to get not only timely and objective measurements of their students' progress and learning outcomes but to reveal their current strengths and weaknesses valuable for their dynamic development and improvement, promoting self- directed and autonomous learning itself. In order to perform these multi-faceted and multi-dimensional functions the assessment system should have a strong theoretical background, i.e. it should be based on the set of appropriate approaches that provide its coherence, integrity and functionality throughout general educational context.

Social constructivist approach dominates in modern translation classroom incorporating the main principles and values of student-centred and process-oriented educational paradigm [7, p. 54]. In this case, translation trainees take an active part in the construction and acquisition of both declarative and procedural translation knowledge, in the development and enhancement of their translation skills through and by doing, and in the formulation of the productive translation strategies from their personal experience [8]. The driving force of students' engagement and participation in this process is seen in the involvement of reflection as an underlying mechanism of learning and making progress. These ideas gradually consolidated and grew into reflective approach to translation and interpretation training (Z. Lee, O. Fox, D. Gile). The majority of the carried out investigations in this area mainly deal with the training aspect, while assessment in this key is still underresearched. In this view, the given study is aimed at the examination of reflective approach application to the assessment arrangement and implementation in modern Ukrainian translation classroom. In order to achieve this goal we will analyse reflective approach in terms of its connections with the other approaches involved, historical aspects of its development, main concepts and ideas, basic principles and provisions as well as promising ways of realization.

In this research, reflective approach is treated as a derivative or subsidiary one from social constructivist approach [1]. It firmly supports and steadily develops main social constructivist ideas and provisions. Reflective approach is also closely connected with the experiential one (D. Kiraly, G. Massey, B. Wang, Y. Lin, D. D'Hayer), which emphasizes the key role of students' previous experience in translation learning. Any experience easily converts into a powerful learning tool in case of systematic and constructive reflection on the process of task performance, critical consideration of the faced translation and training problems, their possible solutions and received outcomes. Reflective approach is also closely connected with the process-oriented approach, since it draws attention to some particular stages of translation task performance and involves students' attitude to them.

Reflection is the central concept of the approach under consideration. According to B. J. Zimmerman [12], it is an integral part of students' self-regulated learning, which incorporates the following phases:

1) forethought (setting goals, making plans, choosing relevant strategies before task performance);

2) performance itself (self-monitoring by comparing the received results with the set goals during the task completion in order to adjust one's performance);

3) reflection (evaluating whether and how the goals were attained after the task accomplishment).

These phases are closely interrelated, since reflection impacts further goal-setting processes, self-monitoring causes reflection shifts and changes in students' self-efficacy and further motivation to translation performance and training.

Reflection is generally defined as a process of thinking, evaluating, and making sense of existing experiences as well as planning for future activities. It is essential for both self-knowledge and self-regulation, since it allows students to evaluate, monitor, and enhance themselves [10]. It lies in deep rather qualitative than quantitative self-reporting of learning and translation processes, outcomes and reasons for one's failures or success. In the context of translation training reflection naturally comprises two aspects at once: learning attitudes and translation competence acquisition process. According to J. Dewey [4], reflection is an active and intentional process launched by some discomfort in experience and resulting in some deeper insights and learning. Its main purpose is to learn from the encountered experience. Reflection is typically triggered by some struggles, uncertainties, dilemmas, or breakthroughs [4], surprising and unexpected moments [11], positive or successful experience [2] faced in the process of task performance. Reflective activity involves perplexity, elaboration, generating hypotheses, their comparing, and taking action. The received results are frequently contrasted to previous experience and past learning.

J. Dewey is considered to be one of the founders of reflective approach to learning and training. He singles out the following steps of reflection process [4]:

1) feeling some kind of difficulty or discrepancy;

2) location and identification of a problem;

3) generating ways of its possible solutions;

4) solutions development with the help of reasoning;

5) further observation or verification leading to the solution acceptance or rejection.

M. Ryan [10] determines four main levels of reflection whose consecutive performance leads to learning progress:

1) report and response to a task or issue;

2) relating the task-connected aspects to one's existing knowledge and experience;

3) reasoning the importance of the reflected task to one's learning and competence acquisition;

4) reconstructing and reframing the available knowledge and skills using new ideas derived from the reflective process.

D. A. Schon [11] distinguishes between two reflective processes:

1) reflection-in-action (performed simultaneously with the task performance, which can lead to some changes in the chosen strategy and selected trajectory on the move);

2) reflection-on-action (performed when the task is already completed).

In our opinion, both of them contribute to translation competence acquisition and professional expertise development. Reflection-in-action involves self-monitoring as the primary technique for formative assessment in the translation classroom, since it draws students' attention to the observation of their task performance and facilitates the control and regulation of their learning actions [5]. However, translation students need to be trained how to self-monitor their translation and learning activities.

Reflection-on-action takes place after the completion of a task in the form of play back focused on the task context and their behavior, achievements and failures, levels of the demonstrated knowledge and skills, and personal factors. It should be accompanied with the generation of alternate outcomes and involve the selection of the key insights and their further transfer to a wider learning or translation context. Reflection-on-action results may initiate self-assessment processes if needed. It also results in learning, problem-solving, research, etc. Reflection quality assessment in terms of strengths, areas for improvement is crucial for its efficiency. It naturally precedes self-assessment providing essential prerequisites for its efficient realization.

In their turn, D. Boud and co-authors [2] widened and summarised the ideas of the previous researchers and suggested their own model of reflection process as follows: reflective philologist translation competence assessment

1) returning to previous experience (recollection of the events, replaying previous experience in one's mind) which corresponds with Schon's [11] reflection-on-action;

2) attending to feelings (positive feelings related to task performance encourage reflection while negative ones prevent it). This aspect was completely neglected by previous studies;

3) re-evaluating experience (formulating and integrating new knowledge into further performance).

Finally, G. Gibbs' six-stage reflective cycle incorporates the combines all the previous concepts into one, primarily active used for the arrangement of debriefing [6]:

1) description of the task performance process (What actually happened?);

2) feelings and emotions (What were you thinking and feeling then?);

3) evaluation (What was good and bad about this experience?);

4) analysis (What valuable conclusions can you make out of this experience?);

5) conclusion with the potential alternatives (What else could you have done?);

6) future action plan (If you get similar task in the future what will you do?).

G. Gibbs [6] stresses the importance of going through all the stages of the reflective process for the sake of its efficiency.

From our point of view, this reflective cycle can serve as a constructive and comprehensive framework for translation students' reflection-on-action to be held in the form retrospective interview, questionnaire, etc.

According to the degree of guidance and scaffolding (i.e. prompt explicitness), all the reflection tools can be subdivided into:

1) open (the reflection is given in a free form without any strong directions). Reflective essays submitted at different training stages are the brightest examples of the tools from this category. Without any directions students mainly tend to provide a report on the actions they performed rather than analyse the problems they faced and their possible solutions or even simply get frustrated and lost in this situation;

2) semi-structured (the reflection takes the form of open-ended answers to specific reflection questions or prompts). The tools from this category include learning/reflective diaries, learning/reflective journals, self-reports, and portfolios provided both in written or digital form [5]. These tools are considered to be the means of students' engagement into reflection process. The sample guiding questions used to guide and direct this process may involve as follows: Have you faced any sociocultural problems in the process of translation? How have you managed to solve transfer problems? Were your translation solutions acceptable and appropriate? How do you feel about your target text? Have you faced similar problems before?

Reflection can also take some forms of group or pair collaborative discussions covering selected issues or problems. They tend to focus either on the learning content (what the students have learned) or on the learning behavior (how they have learned);

3) structured (the reflection is given in the form of quantitative responses on a Likert scale). They are mainly represented by specially developed questionnaires or checklists of learning process, its outcomes, motivation, and self-efficacy.

These activities should be consecutively embedded into instruction process giving space for authentic self-monitoring practice. They should cover different aspects of learning and translation activity at a time. Any self-reflection activity should be followed with the relevant instructor's feedback dealing with the discrepancies between self-monitoring statements and actual level of translation competence acquisition. It is worth noting that unfavorable feedback on a reflective task may have destructive and damaging effect on students' motivation and engagement, and should be avoided.

Here we observe one more challenge connected with the evaluation and assessment of reflection task performance by the students. On the one hand, the quality of reflection provides valuable additional information on the translation process, and, as a result, on students' translation competence level, since it gets the form of abstract representation of translation process. They can also help ensure academic integrity, especially under the growing use of machine translation. On the other hand, reflective tasks assessment should be performed on the basis of clearly defined criteria. They should serve as some kind of directions for the students to be followed and as the way to fight teachers' subjectivity. There is an assumption that students should know exactly what aspects they should reflect on, in what way and volume. In this key, there is an idea to apply bipolar assessment approach: satisfactory / unsatisfactory or avoid any quantitative grade at all, providing only qualitative feedback. One more applicable solution was offered by S. Bown [3]: students are asked to submit five reflection task samples, which represent the diversity of translation problems and learning experiences they have encountered during the term or course. In this case, we launch one more iteration of reflection.

Explanatory questioning techniques, including elaborative interrogation and self-explanation appear to be rather productive for translation classroom. In case of elaborative interrogation, the students are supposed to ask themselves `Why?'-questions, which can deal with their translation solutions, translation strategy choice, translation and learning processes management issues. The ability to formulate a question manifests the awareness and identification of a problem, while the process of responding directs translation knowledge search and construction, translation skills development and strategies elaboration. However, these self-monitoring techniques are rather time- and effort-consuming. Moreover, it is preferable to limit the number of relevant translation or learning skills and strategies to be monitored at a time [9] for achieving clear and deep results. In order to get most of these reflection techniques discussed above, the students should be quite aware of their benefits for the training success. That is why the prospects of the given research are seen in practical development and empirical verification of the suggested reflection tools in Ukrainian translation classroom.

Bibliography

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2. Boud D., Keogh R., Walker D. Reflection: Turning experience into learning. New York: Nicolas Publishing Company, 1985. 170 p.

3. Bown S. Autopoiesis: Scaffolding the reflective practitioner toward employability. International Journal of Interpreter Education. 2013. Vol. 5(1). P. 51-63.

4. Dewey J. How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston, MA: D. C Health, 1933. 301 p.

5. Fostering self-monitoring of university students by means of a standardized learning journal - A longitudinal study with process analyses / S. Fabriz et al. European Journal of Psychology of Education. 2014. Vol. 29(2). P 239-255.

6. Gibbs G. Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. London: Further Education Unit, 1988. 129 p.

7. Hurtado Albir, A. Research on the didactics of translation: Evolution, approaches and future avenues. Porque algo tiene que cmbiar. La formacion de traductores e interpretes: Presente & futuro / Because something should change: Present & Future Training of Translators and Interpreters. MonTI lltrans / Ed. M. Tolosa Igualada, E. Alvaro. 2019. P. 47-76.

8. Kiraly D. Towards a constructivist approach to translator education. Quaderns. Revista de traduccio. 2001. Vol. 6. P. 50-53.

9. Relationship between reflection ability and clinical performance: A cross-sectional and retrospective-longitudinal correlational cohort study in midwifery / M. Embo et al. Midwifery. 2015. Vol. 31(1). P 90-94.

10. Ryan M. The pedagogical balancing act: Teaching reflection in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education. 2013. Vol. 18(2). P 144-155.

11. Schon D.A. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. London: Temple Smith, 1983. 384 p.

12. Zimmerman B. J. Attaining self-regulation: A social cognitive perspective. Handbook of self-regulation / Ed. M. Boekaerts, P R. Pintrich, M. Zeidner. 2000. P 13-39.

References:

1. Korol T.H. Osobystisno-diialnisnyi pidkhid do realizatsiii kontroliu v navchanni perekladu maibutnikh filologiv kriz pryzmu suchasnykh doslidzhen [Personality-and-activity-based approach to the assessment realization in prospective philologists' translation training through the lens of current research]. Topical issues of the humanities: an intercollegiate collection of researchers working with young people with Drohobych workers at Ivan Franko University. 2020. Vol. 32(1). P 231-236. [in Ukrainian]

2. Boud D., Keogh R., Walker D. Reflection: Turning experience into learning. New York: Nicolas Publishing Company, 1985. 170 p.

3. Bown S. Autopoiesis: Scaffolding the reflective practitioner toward employability. International Journal of Interpreter Education. 2013. Vol. 5(1). P. 51-63.

4. Dewey J. How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston, MA: D. C Health, 1933. 301 p.

5. Fostering self-monitoring of university students by means of a standardized learning journal - A longitudinal study with process analyses / S. Fabriz et al. European Journal of Psychology of Education. 2014. Vol. 29(2). P 239-255.

6. Gibbs G. Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. London: Further Education Unit, 1988. 129 p.

7. Hurtado Albir, A. Research on the didactics of translation: Evolution, approaches and future avenues. Porque algo tiene que cmbiar. La formacion de traductores e interpretes: Presente & futuro / Because something should change: Present & Future Training of Translators and Interpreters. MonTI lltrans / Ed. M. Tolosa Igualada, E. Alvaro. 2019. P. 47-76.

8. Kiraly D. Towards a constructivist approach to translator education. Quaderns. Revista de traduccio. 2001. Vol. 6. P 50-53.

9. Relationship between reflection ability and clinical performance: A cross-sectional and retrospective-longitudinal correlational cohort study in midwifery / M. Embo et al. Midwifery. 2015. Vol. 31(1). P 90-94.

10. Ryan M. The pedagogical balancing act: Teaching reflection in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education. 2013. Vol. 18(2). P 144-155.

11. Schon D. A. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. London: Temple Smith, 1983. 384 p.

12. Zimmerman B. J. Attaining self-regulation: A social cognitive perspective. Handbook of self-regulation / Ed. M. Boekaerts, P R. Pintrich, M. Zeidner. 2000. P 13-39.

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