The flipped classroom teaching approach, since the coin of this term in 2012, has attracted much attention with its inverted emphasis on students’ before-class learning and their in-class deep/active participation. The philosophy behind this pedagogical approach lies in the belief that, with the learning content students acquire before they come to the classroom, course time can be better used for students’ active engagement in enhancing their understanding of the acquired concepts and clarifying unclear learning points. In the past decades, this approach has been adopted in many disciplines, translation included. However, the research involving Chinese Mandarin and English as the source/target languages is limited. This study aims at examining both the teacher’s and the students’ teaching/learning perceptions of implementing this pedagogical approach in a translation course with the aid of class observation notes, a survey, and an interview. The class-observation notes reflected a second rater’s observation and after-class verification details with the course instructor (the primary researcher); the survey examined the students’ perceptions of their flipped classroom learning experiences, and the one-on-one interview was carried out to verify the students’ evaluations of their translation-learning perceptions. The findings have revealed that, for this English-to-Chinese translation course, the teacher identified the students’ weak commands in maneuvering their mother tongue and English to be the biggest learning obstacle whereas, for the students’ evaluations, the positive perceptions outweighed the negative ones. This study hopes to provide more insight into translation instruction of not only the English-Chinese combination but also other language pairs.

Authors:
Karen Chung-chien Chang, National Taipei University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Chang is currently a full professor at National Taipei University, Taiwan. Her research interests cover translation/interpretation studies (especially court interpreting), L2 writing, learner autonomy, teacher identity, and distance learning.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule

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