Self-training And Peer Learning In The Consolidation Of Consecutive Interpreting: A Spanish-italian Cohort Study
Auteurs : Bertozzi Michela .
Résumé
This paper presents the preliminary results of a didactic experiment in which second-year Spanish-Italian students of the MA Programme in Interpreting at the University of Bologna (Forlì) tested a teaching unit on the consolidation of consecutive interpreting, part of an interactive online course of self-learning and collaborative learning for interpreting trainees. Unlike the introductory units, which isolate single sub-skills such as active listening or the first approach to note-taking, the unit under discussion addresses the consecutive assignment as a whole, in three successive phases: the autonomous consolidation of note-taking, the documentary and terminological preparation of an assignment, and the management of the performance and its subsequent assessment, each supported by digital resources for interpreters. It is part of an ongoing project on self-learning, peer-learning and digital technologies in interpreter training. Two instruments feed the analysis: an evaluation questionnaire completed by the eight pilot testers, who were also asked about the technical behaviour of the platform, and the final self-assessment that closes the unit, merged across them and the subsequent cohort for a total of fifty-three respondents, twenty-two of whom work between Spanish and Italian. Four findings emerge. The paired feedback on notes is at once the most difficult and the most useful activity for both groups, and the only one the pilot testers place at the top of both scales. The technological management of the assignment is the weakest link, a result stated by both instruments and shared by the whole cohort rather than specific to one language pair. The language combination leaves its clearest trace on the notes themselves: the Spanish-Italian students name logical connectors and the structure of their notes among their weaknesses more often than the whole sample, the direction work on cognate languages would predict, since formal proximity supports the words but not the links between them. Finally, the competence to which the pilot testers feel the unit contributed least, the consolidation of their own note system, is the one the whole cohort overwhelmingly selects for its subsequent autonomous practice: on a sub-competence that stabilises over far longer than any single unit can cover, the unit acts less as a means of consolidation than as a diagnostic instrument.
Mots clés
consecutive preparation ; autonomous practice ; note-taking ; peer feedback ; tablet interpreting ; terminology management ; virtual learning environment
