This is the author’s self-archived preprint version (before proof) of the accepted article

4. How to teach strategies?

What are some of the ways to teach strategies to students? The following may be considered when designing a strategy-training component in interpreter training.

4.1. Teaching goal

Students will be trained to develop the ability to observe and analyze their own interpreting, critique their choice of strategies, and identify areas for improvement.

4.2. Teaching methodology

The students observe recordings of professional performances and identify and analyze the strategies used; they observe their own interpreting performances, analyze the strategies used, compare their strategy use with that of professionals, and identify areas for improvement; they keep a log during self-training and record their interpreting problems and solutions for in-class discussions.

The teacher works as a facilitator; he or she uses diversified materials (speeches with fast delivery rate, high information density, unknown words, strong accents, etc.) which create situations in which the students can apply different types of strategies; he or she elicits students’ problems and solutions in their interpreting and provides comments.
4.3. Exercises

The exercises that can be used to teach strategies are listed in Table 3. Those exercises can be integrated into interpreter training, and serve as the building blocks for CI and SI. They aim at improving the efficiency of strategy training but they are not the only end. The trainer should not take it for granted that students can automatically use these strategies in CI and SI after they have been trained how to use strategies with these exercises. It has been found that prior learning of separate skills cannot be transferred automatically to an integrated task, and that they need to be taught again, in combination with more skills in integrated tasks, in order for the skills to come together to form competence (Calvo Encinas 2001). Therefore, the trainer needs to draw students’ attention to the use of strategies in CI and SI tasks after separate modules on strategy training.

Table 3. Exercises and the teaching of strategies