| Peer assessment,as an effective complement to teachers’ assessment,has received growing attention and is widely used in teaching practice.Despite the increasing popularity of peer assessment in tertiary-level interpreter education,very little research has been conducted to examine the accuracy of peer ratings on language interpretation at postgraduate level.Topping(2010)listed four categories of influential variables that may affect peer assessment results and this study aims to explore two variables,the interpreting ability of peer raters and whether they assess their first or second language,which are contained in the first category,demographic and sample context.The thesis investigates the differences in accuracy of MTI students influenced by the two variables in their peer assessment of bidirectional consecutive interpreting.20 second-year interpreting students were invited as research participants to assess the consecutive interpreting output of the other 3 first-year subjects in the same program as them.Three teacher raters,each with more than seven years’ experience in teaching consecutive interpreting were recruited to assess the interpreting output simultaneously and their average scores were used as benchmarks.Finally,the students’ and teachers’ comments on peer assessment and the current assessment method were collected for further analysis of its effectiveness and improvement of peer assessment procedures.The results of the study show that: 1)the students with higher interpreting ability were more accurate and consistent in their peer ratings than their counterparts with lower interpreting ability;2)students were less accurate when assessing Chinese to English interpreting performance than the other direction;3)students gave more accurate scores for information completeness than fluency of delivery and target language quality. |
