http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jun/15/learners-are-getting-lost-without-translation
----------
----------
Learners are getting lost without translation skills
The
drive to banish learners' mother tongues from classrooms denies them
the vital skill of negotiating meaning between two languages, which is
why translation needs to come in from the cold
On the express train from Karlsruhe to Cologne, a
German passenger is reading engineering documentation in English and
using his mobile phone to pass on the content in German. In the back
office of a Pforzheim jewellery company, a member of the advertising
team is working on the English language version of the company's
website, using the existing German version as her source material.
Meanwhile, a colleague in Idar-Oberstein is rewriting an incoming email
from India for the benefit of her local line manager.
All of these industry professionals – the backbone of the German economy – are required to practise a skill in which they have received little or no formal training. They have attained a reasonable degree of proficiency in spoken English through a succession of language courses that routinely promote the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking, but tend to neglect the fifth skill, that of translation.
Although translation exercises are included in the syllabus of state schools, they are generally absent in the further education sector. The majority of Germany's 957 Volkshochschulen, which provide over six million hours of language training to just under 2 million learners each year, favour communicative language teaching (CLT) which focuses almost entirely on oral practice in the target language.It is perhaps also significant that while state-schools teachers are drawn almost entirely from the local population, the adult education sector includes a high percentage of native English speaker teachers who received their training in an English-only environment in which translation was not an option.
The practice of translation has been referred to as "the poor relation of language teaching" while others see it as "the most important channel of intercultural dialogue", but however you define it, you can't ignore it, for the simple reason that all language learners are to some degree translators and need to become accustomed to negotiating meaning between two or more languages.
Much of the negative reputation of the use of translation as a teaching aid stems from the fact that translation is strongly identified with the grammar/translation method. This first systematic method of teaching and learning English as a foreign language was introduced in Prussia in 1783 and held sway throughout Europe until the second half of the 20th century. Any mention of translation exercises today evokes an image of students learning grammar by rote and struggling through the brain-torturing translation of literary texts.
And here we encounter a further hurdle: to many teachers in Germany, the use of the home language in English classes is taboo or limited to administrative tasks.
In private sector corporate language training, feelings run high. Many teachers believe passionately in banishing the students' mother tongue from the classroom. Donal Elsted of Lernerleben, emphasises the experiential aspects of language learning. "Using the target language only is the god of ELT. It is the teacher's mission," he said. "Students come to me because they want to hear me speak English, not German." Not everyone agrees. Michael Lewis, author of The Lexical Approach, has described this situation as "the teacher trying to keep the two languages apart and the student trying to put them together".
When asked if they use translation in class, most language professionals think of translating key phrases orally for the benefit of students, but rarely consider the more formal use of translation as an aid to learning.
Sometimes the discussion comes down to a matter of definition. Karen Adam Bohley, English trainer at a major automotive supplier in Coburg, sums up the situation in the corporate language training sector: "We make use of the students' mother tongue in class and use source material in the home language, but draw the line at formal translation exercises. Sometimes students translate without being aware of it. We might compare a website in English and German, but we don't call it translation."
She also quotes the dilemma faced by the teacher of an adult learner who had seen the Nespresso advert featuring George Clooney and John Malkovich. The German subtitles translate an exhortation to "make an educated guess" into German as dreimal darfst du raten (you've got three guesses). Naturally enough, the student wanted to know if this idiomatic translation was "right". Few teachers are trained to cope with such instances of contextual translation, although the world around us is rife with such practice.
However, the big picture is neither uniform nor static and a new trend is emerging. Evan Frendo, a teacher trainer based in Germany, says that teaching translation to students of business English is "absolutely the right thing to do. It's a skill they need." This is echoed by Stefan Gee, responsible for all commercial trainees at Henkel Düsseldorf, who frequently asks his students to translate both authentic and trainer-authored emails in both directions, seeing this as a "free practice exercise".
It is also a fact of life that whatever the teacher does, students use bilingual resources outside the classroom, frequently making use of online dictionaries and parallel text resources such as company documentation and websites present in several languages. Outside the classroom, translation is the norm.
Furthermore, learning practices are in a state of flux. Not only in Germany but all over the world native speakers of English are becoming more easily accessible. Web 2.0 technologies now enable learners of English to link up with a native-speaker teacher at relatively little cost. With 57% of German households on broadband, learners no longer need to rely on their local teacher for native-speaker guidance. One consequence of this could be a shift in the role of the face-to-face trainer from pronunciation coach and language provider to language transfer facilitator.
There are signs that previously under-used methodologies such as translation are being re-examined and revitalised. Indeed, there are numerous ways of putting this key skill back into the classroom in a lively and motivating manner, not least the selection of relevant and entertaining source material in audio and video formats as well as in writing, the use of back translation, translation chains, language transfer and decoding games as well as the exploration of existing bilingual texts.
Ian McMaster, editor-in-chief of the English teaching magazine Business Spotlight compares the current situation to that of dictation: "It's like a pendulum that swings to and fro. Dictation went out of fashion and came back. The same thing could happen to translation. It's a matter of finding new ways to do it."
Maybe it is time to reawaken interest in the fifth skill and rescue it from semi-obscurity.
• Maurice Claypole is pedagogical director of LinguaServe and author of Controversies in ELT
All of these industry professionals – the backbone of the German economy – are required to practise a skill in which they have received little or no formal training. They have attained a reasonable degree of proficiency in spoken English through a succession of language courses that routinely promote the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking, but tend to neglect the fifth skill, that of translation.
Although translation exercises are included in the syllabus of state schools, they are generally absent in the further education sector. The majority of Germany's 957 Volkshochschulen, which provide over six million hours of language training to just under 2 million learners each year, favour communicative language teaching (CLT) which focuses almost entirely on oral practice in the target language.It is perhaps also significant that while state-schools teachers are drawn almost entirely from the local population, the adult education sector includes a high percentage of native English speaker teachers who received their training in an English-only environment in which translation was not an option.
The practice of translation has been referred to as "the poor relation of language teaching" while others see it as "the most important channel of intercultural dialogue", but however you define it, you can't ignore it, for the simple reason that all language learners are to some degree translators and need to become accustomed to negotiating meaning between two or more languages.
Much of the negative reputation of the use of translation as a teaching aid stems from the fact that translation is strongly identified with the grammar/translation method. This first systematic method of teaching and learning English as a foreign language was introduced in Prussia in 1783 and held sway throughout Europe until the second half of the 20th century. Any mention of translation exercises today evokes an image of students learning grammar by rote and struggling through the brain-torturing translation of literary texts.
And here we encounter a further hurdle: to many teachers in Germany, the use of the home language in English classes is taboo or limited to administrative tasks.
In private sector corporate language training, feelings run high. Many teachers believe passionately in banishing the students' mother tongue from the classroom. Donal Elsted of Lernerleben, emphasises the experiential aspects of language learning. "Using the target language only is the god of ELT. It is the teacher's mission," he said. "Students come to me because they want to hear me speak English, not German." Not everyone agrees. Michael Lewis, author of The Lexical Approach, has described this situation as "the teacher trying to keep the two languages apart and the student trying to put them together".
When asked if they use translation in class, most language professionals think of translating key phrases orally for the benefit of students, but rarely consider the more formal use of translation as an aid to learning.
Sometimes the discussion comes down to a matter of definition. Karen Adam Bohley, English trainer at a major automotive supplier in Coburg, sums up the situation in the corporate language training sector: "We make use of the students' mother tongue in class and use source material in the home language, but draw the line at formal translation exercises. Sometimes students translate without being aware of it. We might compare a website in English and German, but we don't call it translation."
She also quotes the dilemma faced by the teacher of an adult learner who had seen the Nespresso advert featuring George Clooney and John Malkovich. The German subtitles translate an exhortation to "make an educated guess" into German as dreimal darfst du raten (you've got three guesses). Naturally enough, the student wanted to know if this idiomatic translation was "right". Few teachers are trained to cope with such instances of contextual translation, although the world around us is rife with such practice.
However, the big picture is neither uniform nor static and a new trend is emerging. Evan Frendo, a teacher trainer based in Germany, says that teaching translation to students of business English is "absolutely the right thing to do. It's a skill they need." This is echoed by Stefan Gee, responsible for all commercial trainees at Henkel Düsseldorf, who frequently asks his students to translate both authentic and trainer-authored emails in both directions, seeing this as a "free practice exercise".
It is also a fact of life that whatever the teacher does, students use bilingual resources outside the classroom, frequently making use of online dictionaries and parallel text resources such as company documentation and websites present in several languages. Outside the classroom, translation is the norm.
Furthermore, learning practices are in a state of flux. Not only in Germany but all over the world native speakers of English are becoming more easily accessible. Web 2.0 technologies now enable learners of English to link up with a native-speaker teacher at relatively little cost. With 57% of German households on broadband, learners no longer need to rely on their local teacher for native-speaker guidance. One consequence of this could be a shift in the role of the face-to-face trainer from pronunciation coach and language provider to language transfer facilitator.
There are signs that previously under-used methodologies such as translation are being re-examined and revitalised. Indeed, there are numerous ways of putting this key skill back into the classroom in a lively and motivating manner, not least the selection of relevant and entertaining source material in audio and video formats as well as in writing, the use of back translation, translation chains, language transfer and decoding games as well as the exploration of existing bilingual texts.
Ian McMaster, editor-in-chief of the English teaching magazine Business Spotlight compares the current situation to that of dictation: "It's like a pendulum that swings to and fro. Dictation went out of fashion and came back. The same thing could happen to translation. It's a matter of finding new ways to do it."
Maybe it is time to reawaken interest in the fifth skill and rescue it from semi-obscurity.
• Maurice Claypole is pedagogical director of LinguaServe and author of Controversies in ELT
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét