Examining The Effect Of Connectives On Comprehension During Interpreting

Choosing source texts with an appropriate difficulty level is arguably a fundamental step for interpreting trainers.Among all factors that influence the difficulty level,textual coherence is a frequently mentioned factor.There have already been studies on the role of textual coherence signals(connectives)in the reading and listening context,with most of them proving the positive effect of connectives on reading and listening comprehension.The purpose of this thesis is to expand the research on connectives in reading and listening context and test the effect of connectives on comprehension in interpreting context.Three tools are used to investigate the effect of connectives in this research:expert judgment,recall task,and questionnaire.This research invited interpreting teachers to give their opinions,and an experiment of a recall task on 40 novice learners was conducted,so as to explore whether and how connectives affect comprehension in consecutive interpreting context.In the experiment,the author edited one speech into two versions:with and without connectives.Participants were divided into two groups,one listening to the version with connectives and the other listening to the version without connectives.Within each group,participants were further divided into note-taking and no notes groups.They listened as if they were going to conduct consecutive interpreting,and then finished a recall task.Finally,they filled out the questionnaire.The results show that:1)the overall effect of connectives on comprehension is mixed;2)there is connectives x note-taking interaction in interpreting context.Connectives have a positive effect on comprehension when participants take notes;when they do not take notes,the effect is not clear,or even unhelpful.Thus,note-taking plays an important role in the effect of connectives.It is the path through which connectives affect interpreting comprehension.In the end,implications for interpreting teaching and test are provided.Limitations and suggestions for future studies are also mentioned.