earticle

영어

Experts agree that two approaches should be adopted in a foreign language classroom: integrating the four main language skills, i.e., listening, reading, speaking, and writing, and helping students relieve their anxiety. To address both needs, this paper proposes and examines a new approach to foreign language teaching: incorporating translation/interpretation practice into the foreign language classroom. The potential of translation/ interpretation as a pedagogical instrument in foreign language teaching is three-fold. Firstly, it helps create a learning environment where students can use language in a communicative environment with many specific contextual clues. Secondly, it helps students feel mentally less burdened because translation/interpretation does not involve a creative production of a new text with new information, and instead asks students to process already given information. Thirdly, incorporating translation/interpretation into the teaching of a foreign language is an effective way of triggering the four main language skills at the same time in the foreign language classroom. With these assumptions, this paper attempts to explore the potential of translation/interpretation activity as a pedagogical instrument of foreign language teaching with an experiment implemented in an undergraduate translation/ interpretation classroom. Following the introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 recaps relevant research results on the anxiety factor in the foreign language classroom, the need to approach language teaching in a communication-promoting way, and the effectiveness of integrating the four main language skills. Chapter 3 introduces the experiment design focusing on a comparison in subjective comfort and sense of achievement between a control and an experimental group when asked to perform a spontaneous speech on a specific topic chosen in relation to a pre-announced broader subject area. Chapter 4 discusses the experiment results with possible explanation proposals. The conclusion summarizes the implications of the present experiment for foreign language pedagogy, followed by the limitations of the present research together with future research issues along these lines.