The Application Of Reflective Journal To Translation Teaching In English Majors

Nowadays，during translation teaching practice among English majors, teachersoften focus much on teaching students translation theories and developing theirabilities, paying much attention to exploring students’ non-intellectual factors, whileneglecting the cultivation of students’ reflective ability. What’s more, most teachers donot know how to develop students’ reflective ability. As a result, students do not havereflective consciousness, or do not know how to reflect and their reflective ability canhardly be improved.Li Defeng from Chinese University of Hong Kong introduced reflective journalon Summer National Translation Teaching and Practice of High-level Seminar in2006,which helped teacher solve how to guide students to reflect. Therefore, based on theprevious research on reflective learning and reflective journal, particularly theresearch conducted by Li Defeng, the author tempts to apply reflective journal intotranslation teaching of English majors and its feasibility and effectiveness will beapproved through an empirical study. The research questions are as follows:1) Canreflective journal arouse students’ translation interests?2) Can the implication ofreflective journal advance English majors’ translation competence?3) To what degreewould reflective journals improve students’ level of reflective thinking and raise theirmetacognitive awareness of translation learning?4) Compared with traditionalteaching approach, can the reflective journal improve translation teaching efficiency?Under the guidance of the above research questions, by pre-testing all thestudents of four classes over150students, the author chose two proximate-levelnatural classes one as the comparison group, and the other as the experiment group,which lasted16weeks. During the process of translation teaching, students in theexperimental group were required to hand in their reflective journals with thetranslation assignments; otherwise, the assignment would not be graded. While in thecomparison group, students were not taught the knowledge about reflective journal, and they didn’t need to write reflective journals. They only needed to hand in thetranslation assignments. After the teaching experiment, the post-questionnaire, thepost-test and interview were carried out, and the results of them were all analyzedquantitatively and qualitatively with SPSS13.0.The findings of the teaching experiment were:1) Reflective journal, as a channelfor student-teacher communication, enhanced students’ enthusiasm and interest fortranslation learning, and contributed a lot to their initiative in translation practice afterclass.2) The application of reflective journal to translation teaching in English majorseffectively raised students’ translation competence.3) With the accumulation ofexperience, students’ reflection ability improved over time and their metacognitiveawareness of translation learning also increased throughout the research.4) Theresults of post-questionnaire and interview indicated that the application of reflectivejournal to translation teaching in English majors could effectively guide translationteaching.Finally, according to the findings of the research, the author proposed theimplications and suggestions for future study, and also points out the deficiencies andlimitations of this research, and the future direction of research to be improved.