The Use of Self- and Peer Assessment to Enhance Learner-centeredness in Translator Education

Abstract

For a long period of time, translation has been taught using the traditional teacher- centered approaches in which students are rarely engaged in the process of their learning. In these teacher-centered approaches, students play no role but that of passive learners who wait for the teacher to ‘spoon-feed’ them with the knowledge they need to learn in a given course. In contemporary research of Translation Studies, scholars have called for a move away from this traditional teacher-centered approach to a more learner-centered one in which students are actively engaged in their learning and assume responsibility for that learning. This study aspires to achieve this learner-centeredness in a translation classroom especially in regard to the assessment aspects of learning. Students were actively engaged in the whole assessment process including developing the assessment criteria, practicing assessment of their work and that of their classmates through “self- and peer assessment”, and judging the quality of their learning. The study aims to investigate the impact of doing so on the quality of students’ performance and how students perceived their engagement in this process.