consecutive interpreting

This study was conducted to remedy the shortcomings of the curriculum that the authors had developed for the course of “Consecutive Interpreting”. The curriculum had been designed adopting a social constructivist framework and implemented for a semester to detect the imperfections. Since the main problems centered on the paucity of learner's interactions and the limitedness of the existing interactions to few learners, the face-to-face class was complemented with an online class on Moodle. The blended design was implemented for another semester to evaluate its efficiency in solving the problems. The participants of the study were all the 54 students who enrolled in the course in the intended semester. Moodle's forum was the module used for this study. Accordingly, three public forums were used for discussions over listening comprehension assignments, note-taking activities, and activities in the face-to-face class. Since Moodle is capable of recording and saving all the activities performed by users, it was used as the instrument for data collection as well. All the discussions in the forums were studied during the whole semester first to determine the extent to which interactions occurred, and second, study the interactions considering such variables as gender, age, and a semester of entrance. The study revealed that "forum" enhanced the interactions. Besides, the differences between the mean participation rate of students with different gender, age and semester of entrance turned out not to be significant, indicating that such variations in the online class had not been barriers hindering learners from getting into interaction

The present study was conducted to trace the progress of students discussions in Moodle forums and investigate the capacity of the forums in obviating the problems that students faced in doing their activities in the undergraduate course of Consecutive Interpreting. The problems that are discussed in this article were related to the process-oriented activities of listening comprehension, note-taking and role play whose proper fulfillment is of prime importance in social constructivism. To conduct the study, a blended learning environment was used in the sense that for a whole semester, the face-to-face class was complemented with an online class designed on the Moodle e-learning platform. The study revealed that although the forum which was designed for small groups in role play activity was not well-received, the other two public forums which were designed for listening comprehension and note-taking activities were welcomed and participated by all the students. In the two public forums, students got into interactions with one another and used the forums as a site for solving their problems and proposing suggestions. The study suggests that an online class which is designed, guided and supervised properly by the instructor and used as a complement to a face-to-face class would have the potential to facilitate constructive interactions among learners through which they can solve their problems. This, in turn, could promote the feeling of responsibility and autonomy among learners.