An Experimental Research On The Application Of E-Portfolio Assessment In Undergraduate Interpreting Course

Teaching evaluation is one of the essential parts of teaching,which plays the role of guidance,appraisal,feedback,and adjustment in the entire teaching process.However,the evaluation of interpreting courses at present is faced with some problems,such as single subject,summative assessment,ambiguous criteria,fixed indicators and delayed feedback.It does not pay enough attention to learner difference,interpreting process and ability development,and cannot effectively assess learners’ interpreting proficiency,resulting in a gap between interpreter nurturing and actual social needs.With the popularization of the Internet and the upgrading of teaching facilities,e-portfolio,which integrates the advantages of paper-based portfolio and information technology,is regarded as a powerful means of improving teaching evaluation.Scholars at home and abroad have conducted a series of empirical researches on the feasibility of e-portfolio assessment in EFL writing,speaking and teaching,and have provided new ideas and methods for EFL teaching evaluation.Because relatively few previous studies were concerned with interpreting,this study attempts to apply e-portfolio assessment to undergraduate English-Chinese interpreting course to explore its effects on learners’ interpreting proficiency and learners’ attitudes towards it.And this research aims to answer two questions:1.Does e-portfolio assessment improve learners’ interpreting proficiency in the EFL context?2.What are learners’ attitudes towards the use of e-portfolio assessment in interpreting course? And what are their gains and problems?The current study employed a mixed method and was conducted among the juniors majoring in Business English in Y university in H province.Two classes containing 45 participants taught by the same interpreting teacher were selected by purposive sampling and convenience sampling,and then assigned to the treatment group and the control group respectively.The treatment group was subjected to e-portfolio assessment,while the control group,on the contrary,was still assessed by traditional methods.Except for evaluation method,there was no difference in terms of course content and arrangement between the two groups.Results of pretests and posttests of both groups,questionnaire and interview of the treatment group were mainly collected,and then were analyzed by SPSS and thematic analysis.Based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collected,the findings were summarized as follows:1.Two paired sample t tests showed a significant increase in posttest in both groups compared with their pretest results.Although the treatment group outperformed the control group in fluency in posttest,the differences between both groups in fidelity,accuracy and fluency in posttest were not statistically significant.2.Results of questionnaire and interview indicated that initially learners had some negative responses to e-portfolio assessment such as “time-consuming” and“troublesome” because they were unfamiliar with interpreting and operations.With the development of various activities like peer review and teacher feedback,however,they gradually got accustomed to this new kind of evaluation method,and thought highly of its advantages of improving proficiency,promoting interactions,increasing audience awareness,building confidence and facilitating independent learning.Meanwhile,they expressed their willingness to further use e-portfolio assessment in other courses,and also offered some constructive advice related to activity arrangement and platform optimization like adjusting the group size to 3～4 students,increasing the number of task reminders,etc.The present research also provided some implications for the further application of e-portfolio assessment,teaching evaluation reform and interpreter training in the information era as well.On the one hand,the development and application of e-portfolio assessment cannot be divorced from optimized platforms,simplified operations and necessary training.On the other hand,the teaching evaluation reform needs to renew the concept of evaluation,clarify the criteria and focus on the diversity and rationality of teaching evaluation methods.In addition,interpreter nurturing must be vocation-oriented,and create real contexts for interpreting practice and training by feat of information-based tools.