The Teaching Methods in Translation Courses: Quality, Relevance and Resources

Subject Areas : Journal of Teaching English Language Studies

Mohmmad Iman Askari ¹ , Jahanbaksh Nikoopour ² , Roxana Aminzadeh ³

1 - Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English Language Teaching, North Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2 - Assistant Professor, Department of English Language Teaching, North Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
3 - Assistant Professor, Department of English Language Teaching, North Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Received: 2018-06-30 Accepted : 2018-08-04 Published : 2018-09-01

Keywords: Methods of teaching translation, Translation courses, English-major students,

Abstract :

The study was intended to provide a description of the attitudes of English-major studentstowards the teaching methods in translation courses to find out more about the relevance andquality of methods to the students’ needs, concerning the necessary educational resourcesprovided in the methods of teaching. Accordingly, a multi-item Likert-scale questionnairecontaining 32 items was developed based on the principles applied in the three traditional,complex and modern methods of teaching for collecting the research data. Cronbach’s alphawas administered for estimating the reliability of the items. Besides, experts’ judgment anditem analysis were used for the coverage and relevance of content and construct validity. Tocollect the research’s data, 100 questionnaires were distributed among 100 homogenizedparticipants to provide their responses for each item. The data were analyzed via SPSSsoftware, in which each of the participants and items had one row and column, respectively.The responses to the items were stored as numbers from 1 to 5 according to the Likert-scales.Besides, value labels were used to ascribe text labels to the numbers. Moreover, the frequencytables were then extracted via descriptive statistics of SPSS software to generate the summaryof the participants’ responses to the items, based on which the final data analysis and reportswere provided. As a result, although all the methods were common, but the modern methodschallenged the previous methods and emphasized the necessity for further incorporation of theexisting principles for assuring the quality and relevance. The results of the study would behelpful for students and instructors in teaching languages and translation studies via enablingthem to find out how subtle variations in methods might lead the learners to the variousdirections depending on their various attitudes.

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