Exploring The Cognitive Process Of Consecutive Interpreting-A Schema Theory Perspective

The notion of schema can be dated back to the year of 1781 when greatphilosopher Immanuel Kant published his classic book titled Critique of PureReason. Ever since then it has been developed into an important term ofCognitive Psychology and applied to study many cognitive phenomena ofhuman beings. According to Sir Frederic C. Bartlett, British psychiatrist,schema refers to "an active organisation of past reactions, or of pastexperiences"(Bartlett, 1995:201). The activation of schema is involved in anycognitive task in the brain. Therefore, schema bears great practicalsignificance on exploring various cognitive processes of human beings.Due to this unique feature, schema theory has been widely applied toresearch in other fields, in Artificial Intelligence and TESL in particular, andsome breakthroughs and achievements have been made in this regard.Interpreting, involving cognitive processes such as SL comprehension,memory, TL construction and generation, demands great interdisciplinaryinput so that breakthroughs can be made in interpreting studies. That's whyschema-application interpreting studies have been tried and carried out inrecently years. Data and results so far have shown that interpretingperformance and schema are closely linked. However, detailed discussion and elaboration on how they are closely related to each other is difficult to find andmore often than not it is limited to analysis on how schema affectscomprehension in interpreting with little touch on other important aspects suchas memory or TL generation. In order to fill in this gap, this thesis aims toexplore how schema guides through and affects the performance ofcomprehension, memory and TL reproduction in an attempt to have a betterunderstanding of cognitive processes involved in consecutive interpreting,advance interpreting studies and provide a theoretical reference to interpretingpractice and interpreting teaching and training.The thesis consists of five chapters besides introduction and conclusion.The introduction briefs the theme, aims, significance, researchmethodology and structure of this thesis.Chapter one gives a brief overview about the notion of schema in termsof its philosophical origin, modern development and its specified definition.Chapter two analyzes how schema can be applied to interpreting studies,including the history and feature (interdisciplinarity) of interpreting studies,literature review of schema-application interpreting studies in China and theinsight for this study.Chapter three focuses on the schema activation during comprehension inconsecutive interpreting and how it facilities the full comprehension of SL.Chapter four examines the important role schema plays during memory inconsecutive interpreting and how chunking and note-taking guided by schemaenable better memory performance.Chapter five discusses how schema affects the TL reproduction involvingsubstages such as TL construction, production, monitoring and correcting.The conclusion sums up the whole thesis and briefs the theoretical andpractical significance as well as the deficiencies of this thesis.