An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Students’ Interpreting Self-Efficacy And Interpreting Performance In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

The self-efficacy theory was put forward by American psychologist Albert Bandura,which is a subset of his social cognitive theory.It refers to personal belief in one’s capabilities to succeed in specific situations or accomplish certain tasks.Since its introduction in the 1970s,the theory has been widely used in the field of second language acquisition,while the application of the self-efficacy theory to interpreting studies is relatively inadequate,especially in China.This paper aims to analyze the relationship between student interpreters’English-Chinese consecutive interpreting performance and their interpreting self-efficacy(ISE)levels through an empirical study of 20 MTI students at BFSU with S.B.Lee’s ISE questionnaire and an English-Chinese consecutive interpreting experiment.The SPSS 25.0 program was used to carry out the quantitative analysis of the two variables and their correlation,and the results were further supported by qualitative analysis of the interpreting performance of six randomly selected subjects.The results of the quantitative analysis showed that there is a highly significant positive correlation between the subjects’ self-efficacy and their interpreting performance.The subscales of self-confidence(SC)and self-regulatory efficacy(SR)enjoy very strong correlation with students’ consecutive interpreting performance.The results of qualitative analysis indicated that the student interpreters’ interpreting self-efficacy levels could only predict their overall interpreting performance,but not specific details of their performance.This study provides some insights for English-Chinese consecutive interpreting learning and teaching in China.According to the statistical analysis on the correlation between self-efficacy and academic help-seeking behavior,several suggestions can be concluded as follows:students should actively seek help if the difficulties in the learning process are too overwhelming to handle,and teachers should pay more attention to students’psychological states and offer targeted suggestions to help students improve their self-efficacy and understand the benefits of help-seeking.