The accuracy of student self-assessments of English-Chinese bidirectional interpretation: a longitudinal quantitative study

Abstract

The accuracy of self-assessment has long been examined empirically in higher education research, producing a substantial body of literature that casts light on numerous potential moderators. However, despite the growing popularity of self-assessment in interpreter training and education, very limited evidence-based research has been initiated to shed insight into the formative assessment of language interpretation. This longitudinal study was therefore conducted to investigate to what extent student self-assessments of English-Chinese interpretation are accurate and how the accuracy level would change over time. Major findings are: (1) in general self-assessment accuracy improved over time for both interpreting directions; (2) regarding the three scoring dimensions of information completeness, fluency of delivery and target language quality, there was greater self-assessment accuracy for English-to-Chinese interpretation than in the other direction; (3) while information completeness was most accurately self-assessed in English-to-Chinese direction, the pattern was reversed in the opposite direction; and (4) the students tended to over-score the three quality dimensions for Chinese-to-English interpretation at each time point. These results are discussed in the light of the accuracy issue, its longitudinal trend and potential factors affecting the self-assessment of bidirectional interpretation.