An Investigation Into MTI Students’ Interpreting Learning Agency In The Post-COVID-19 Period

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a heavy blow to all aspects of production and life since its outbreak and is still spreading across the globe.The world now has entered the postCOVID-19 era.For MTI students,the employment prospect,interpreting market situation and MTI teaching situation also have been reshaped by the pandemic.Therefore,the response of MTI students for coping with those dynamics is worth exploring.As an interdisciplinary concept,the core of agency is to explore individual reactions in front of challenges,despite diverse definitions and theoretical frameworks of agency developed in discrete disciplines.Among existing mass studies on agency,in terms of the theoretical framework,the sociocultural perspective towards agency is mostly adopted by those studies on agency,and the ecological approach is barely employed.In terms of research topics or fields,studies on learner agency that focus on the process of interpretation learning are inadequate as well.Under the broad context of the pandemic and the research background of agency,this thesis adopts the conceptual framework of agency from an ecological perspective as the theoretical foundation,and conducts an empirical study from the perspective of MTI students who major in interpreting,aiming to explore the following 2 research questions through qualitative analysis:1)What are the patterns of MTI students’ interpreting learning agency in the post-COVID-19 period?2)What are the influencing factors of MTI students’interpreting learning agency?Interpreting learning agency is highly individualized,and features complexity and multiplicity.Therefore,in order to find the answers corresponding to the above two research questions,and to investigate in-depth the patterns of MTI students’ interpreting learning agency,the thesis recruited volunteers from all three postgraduate grades in the School of Advanced Translation and Interpretation of a certain Chinese university for qualitative interviews.The findings of this thesis are as follows:1)The patterns of interpreting learning agency of interpretating postgraduates in the post-COVID-19 period can be summarized as three categories:active adjustment,compliance,and avoidance.Active adjustment refers to some responses of MTI students that try to make self-adjustments and actively cope with certain problems related to interpreting learning.Compliance refers to some responses of MTI students that tend to passively tolerant and maintain the status quo when facing certain difficulties related to interpreting learning.Avoidance refers to some responses of MTI students that directly give up coping with the difficulties or even intentionally ignore the existence of those problems emerging in their interpreting learning process.2)The factors that affect those three agency patterns are related to the learners’ past experiences,future plans,and the current learning environment.The current learning environment is mainly about the broad context under the pandemic situation,including the market situation of interpreters,the employment situation of interpreting postgraduates,as well as the school’s MTI teaching arrangements,the class teaching methods and the behaviors of peer classmates.The combined effect of those multiple factors serves as the catalyst to different patterns of interpreting learning agency.