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teachers and students and in general for for-
eign language education to be followed.
Doye (1993), cited in Byram (1997),
draws parallels between foreign language edu-
cation and ‘politishe Bildung’ as understood in
the German tradition of schooling. He bases
his analysis on Gogel’s (1983) distinction of
three kinds of orientation to be offered across
all subjects to young people during their gen-
eral education:
1) Cognitive orientation: the acquisition
of concepts, knowledge and modes of analysis
for the understanding of different phenomena,
2) Evaluative orientation: the explana-
tion and mediation of values,
3) Action orientation: development of
the ability and the readiness for different types
of engagement.
When teachers are not comfortable with
political or religious orientations, they can
base their intercultural communicative compe-
tence differently on morale or other aspects of
values. ICC teaching within a school or insti-
tution has this responsibility to establish an
awareness of the values and significance of
cultural practices in the other and own culture.
What in effect proves critically needed and
crucial is that in any way possible, whether
registered techniques or even innovative of the
teachers themselves, the teachers and learners
shall try to attain ability in intercultural inter-
action through a language and its relationship
to the cultural practices and identities inter-
locutors bring to an interaction.
The assessment of ICC is complex but
rewarding as it provides feedback to students
related to their intercultural learning, and it
also informs teachers about the nature and
level of their students’ intercultural perform-
ance.
In this context, distinction should be
made between formative and summative as-
sessment. The former is carried out during the
course as an ongoing process, with the aim of
giving students guidance on their perform-
ance, and improving the learning process,
while the latter evaluates the learners’
achievement at the end of a course, with a fi-
nal grade or mark. Since ICC covers cognitive,
behavioral and affective domains, its evalua-
tion should be formative rather than summa-
tive [9, 23].
Secondly, the assessment of ICC should
be continuous and not administered at one or
two instances during a course. ICC may be
assessed either by the teacher, or by the stu-
dents themselves.
Thirdly, assessment can be carried out
at different phases of a course. For example, a
pre-test intends to find out the initial level of
the students’ Intercultural knowledge, deft-
ness’s and attitudes before the course starts, a
test during the course can “gauge progress and
increase motivation” [10, 194], and a post-test
measures the students’ intercultural knowl-
edge, skills and attitudes after the course has
ended, giving thus some indication of the ef-
fectiveness of intercultural learning.
Fourthly, different types of test format
may be resorted to at different stages of an
intercultural course, depending on the goals of
instruction. Tests may be roughly divided into
goal and subjective ones. The former require
no evaluative judgment on the part of the as-
sessor, whereas the latter involve some kind of
personal evaluation of the assessor’s perform-
ance.
A further distinction is made between
holistic and analytic assessment. The former
means making a global impressionistic judg-
ment about the learners’ performance on a task
as a whole, whereas the latter requires that the
assessor should observe closely all the three
dimensions of ICC, or each dimension sepa-
rately in order to come out with different pro-
files of learner performance [9, 25].
Finally, the assessment of ICC may be
either direct or indirect. The former measures
learner performance directly by requiring the
assessing to perform a role play, or discuss
another culture’s attitudes in a small group
with the assessor matching their performance
to the most appropriate categories on a criteria
grid. Indirect assessment, on the other hand, is
a pen-and-paper test, which often assesses in-
tercultural knowledge [9, 39].
When assessing ICC, the teacher in-
variably becomes an observer of the intercul-
tural learning process rather than of its end
product. Therefore,
Standardized tests based on a norm, and
grading learners with a mark and score as a
result of indirect testing, lose their relevance
here. By contrast, the teacher has to rely upon
alternative assessment tools, such as self-
evaluation reports, portfolios, observation
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checklists of the intercultural learning process
and of students’ progress. For these reasons,
the main purpose of ICC assessment is to give
teachers, as well as students, an estimation of
the intercultural learning, based upon concrete
descriptors and criteria of performance, which
are categorized in terms of low, medium and
high profile.
We found out that foreign or second
language education has culturally and intercul-
tural grown and come to this conclusion that
foreign or second language learners should be
intercultural equipped to enjoy an efficient
communication in this globalized community.
Textbooks evidently play a great role in this
demand and authenticity of materials with all
intercultural factors and objectives is, needless
to say, a requirement hitherto neglected to
some extent. Authenticity of the texts shall be
kept intact and, if felt extremely necessary,
they can be amended without losing its initial
message.
REFERENCES
1. Harris, J. G. (1975). Identification of cross-
cultural talent: The empirical approach of
the Peace Corps. Topics in Culture Learn-
ing, 3
2. Lustig, M. W., & Koester, J. (1999). Inter-
cultural competence: Interpersonal commu-
nication across cultures (3rd ed.). New
York: Longman.
3. Herek, G., M., & Giles, H. (2000, June).
New directions in intercultural communica-
tion competence: The process model. Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the In-
ternational Communication Association,
Acapulco, Mexico.
4. Collier, M. J., & Thomas, M. (1988). Iden-
tity in intercultural communication: An in-
terpretive perspective. In Y. Kim & W.
Gudykunst (Eds.), Theories of intercultural
communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
5. Spitzberg, B. H., & Cupach, W. R. (1989).
Handbook of interpersonal competence re-
search. New York: Springer-Verlag.
6. Parks, M. R. (1976, November). Communi-
cation competence. Paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Speech Communica-
tion Association, San Francisco.
7. Ruben, B. D., & Kealey, D. (1979). Behav-
ioral assessment of communication compe-
tency and the prediction of cross-cultural
adaptation. International Journal of Intercul-
tural Relations, 3.
8. Wiseman, R. L., & Abe, H. (1984). Finding
and explaining differences: A reply to
Gudykunst & Hammer. International Jour-
nal of Intercultural Relations, 8.
9. Lussier, D., Ivanus, D., Chavdarova-
Kostova, S., Golubina, K., Skopinskaja, L.,
Wiesinger, S., de la Maya Retamar, G.
2007. Guidelines for the Assessment of In-
tercultural Communicative Competence in
Lazar, I., Huber-Kriegler, M., Lussier, D.,
Matei, G.S., Peck, C. Developing and As-
sessing Intercultural Communicative Com-
petence: A Guide for Language Teachers
and Teacher Educators, Strasbourg and
Graz: European Centre for Modern Lan-
guages and Council of Europe Publishing.
10. Corbett, J. 2003. An Intercultural Ap-
proach to English Language Teaching,
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
УДК 811.11’342
“PRACTICAL PHONETICS” COURSE IN TEACHING “TRANSLATION
STUDIES” MAJOR STUDENTS
Kuznetsova N.
The profession of translator is becoming
more and more popular at present. Many
school graduates enroll in universities to train
in Translation Studies. Nowadays this profes-
sion is considered prestigious and perspective.
Knowing a language opens ways to foreign
countries, whether it would be a fellowship
program or a business trip. In the latter case
people often use the assistance of an inter-
preter. In order to perceive a foreign speech it
is necessary to have special listening and
speaking skills. In the process of oral bilingual
translation the interpreter should listen to a
speech, simultaneously process information in
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his head and then represent this information in
another language. According to the State
Obligatory Educational Standard of the Re-
public of Kazakhstan, for the purpose of
teaching a student of Translation Studies to
this type of translation the “Oral Translation
Practice” discipline is included into the cur-
riculum. [8] The course includes teaching dif-
ferent types of interpreting: conversation bi-
lingual interpretation, sequential interpreta-
tion, paragraph-phrase interpretation, speech
interpretation. [8] Generally the “Oral Transla-
tion Practice” is included into an educational
course of the fourth year of the undergraduate
program “Translation Studies” Major. The
course contains 3 credits (135 hours). In ac-
cordance with “Oral Translation Practice” dis-
cipline standard study program, designed by
the teachers of Kazakh Ablai-Khan University
of International Relations and World Lan-
guages, the interpreter should have such skills
as:
- perception of source text taking into
account individual features of a speech pre-
senter;
- carrying out fast sequential interlan-
guage transmission with the translation rate
equal to a speaking rate of speaker;
- fast switching from one language to
another (in terms of text perception and repro-
duction);
- presenting statements with the right in-
tonation according to the target language stan-
dards [2, p. 385].
According to the “Oral Translation
Practice” discipline standard study program,
the course prerequisites, i.e. disciplines con-
taining knowledge, abilities and skills neces-
sary to learn “Oral Translation Practice” are:
[4]
Translation
Theory,
Modern
Ka-
zakh/Russian Language Theory and Practice,
General-Professional Foreign Language, Lit-
erary Translation Practice, Written Translation
Practice, Regional Geography [2, p. 385].
These disciplines help student in acquiring
theoretical and practical bases of translation,
intercultural communication and translator’s
speech competence, general notion about the
country of a language under study. The main
background for learning “Oral Translation
Practice” course should include such skill as
perception of speech in conditions of hin-
drances (street noise, music, talking people) or
clear sound (without any noise). Such skill
may be acquired when training “Practical
Phonetics” discipline. Practical phonetics in-
cludes learning language structure, sounds and
their functions, training a correct pronuncia-
tion and intonation. Practical phonetics repre-
sents one of the practical courses composing
the cycle of disciplines for preparation of sec-
ond year “Translation Studies” students [8].
One of the most important tools in the
preparation of “Translation Studies” students
is auding, which is included into the course of
Practical Phonetics. According to T.A.
Dmitrenko; “… auding should be on the level
of communicative competence formulation,
i.e.:
- the ability to understand literary-
colloquial speech of native speaker in the daily
conversation situations;
- the ability to understand the content of
audio text in the conditions of indirect mes-
sage perception ( radio, TV set);
- texts, perceived aurally, should be au-
thentic [3, p. 10].
The auding for graduate students should
include the following tasks: solving such
communicative problems as full and exact
comprehension (for adequate response to in-
formation), receiving significant information”
[3, p. 11].
The main principle for successive aud-
ing is a foreign language text comprehension.
R.L. Minyar-Beloruchev describes different
levels of text comprehension in his work
“How to Become Interpreter?” [5, p. 93] Ac-
cording to R.L. Minyar-Beloruchev, the low-
est level is fragmentary, when recipient (a lis-
tener) understands only separate words, word-
groups (fragment); higher level is the level of
general comprehension of the text. In this case
it is understood what text is about (about the
trip to the Crimea, about the harvest in the Al-
tay, etc). The third level is detailed, when stu-
dents understand particular facts (details) as,
for example: color of the singer’s dress, mili-
tary rank of an officer who saved people dur-
ing the fire, etc. The forth level is critical,
concerning not only text (what has been said)
but subtext (the purpose of the information)
too [5, p. 94]. In order to convey the precise
meaning the interpreter should have a critical
level of text comprehension.
Jack C. Richards, educator and the fa-
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mous scientist in the sphere of applied linguis-
tics, distinguished two different kinds of proc-
esses involved in understanding spoken dis-
course: bottom-up and top-down processing
[6, p. 9]. Bottom-up processing refers to using
the incoming input as the basis for understand-
ing the message. Comprehension begins with
the received data that is analyzed as successive
levels of organization – sounds, words,
clauses, sentences, texts – until meaning is
derived. Comprehension is viewed as a proc-
ess of decoding. The listener’s lexical and
grammatical competence in a language pro-
vides the basis for bottom-up processing. The
input is scanned for familiar words, and
grammatical knowledge is used to work out
the relationship between elements of sen-
tences. Learners need a large vocabulary and a
good working knowledge of sentence structure
to process texts bottom-up. Many traditional
classroom listening activities focus primarily
on bottom-up processing, with exercises such
a dictation, close listening, the use of multiple-
choice questions after a text, and similar ac-
tivities that require close and detailed recogni-
tion, and processing of the input. It is assumed
that everything the listener needs to under-
stand is contained in the input. Top-down
processing refers to the use of background
knowledge in understanding the meaning of a
message whereas bottom-up processing goes
from language to meaning, top-down process-
ing goes from meaning to language. The
background knowledge required for top-down
processing may be previous knowledge about
the topic of discourse, situational or contextual
knowledge, or knowledge in the form of
“schemata” or “scripts” – plans about the
overall structure of events and the relation-
ships between them. [6, p. 9].
In “Theory of Translation” textbook,
V.V. Sdobnikov marked that the reception of
original message by the interpreter for the next
transmission of it in the transliterated form to
the receiver results in perception and compre-
hension of oral speech (auding). [7, page 305]
The problem of auding results in the problem
of oral speech understanding. Comparison of
original messages with translations showed
that the majority of nonconformance is gener-
ated by auding peculiarities. The origins of
perversions when auding in the sequential
translation are:
- unknown and unfamiliar words;
- precise words (for e.g. numerals);
- low distinguishing abilities to some
phonemes recognition (when auding text in a
foreign language) [7, p. 306].
V.V. Sdobnikov points out additional
difficulties of auding. There are situations
when main notional sentence parts remain
without translation (deletion of main sentence,
subordinate clause, subject). Thus, there are
two main reasons for deletion and mistakes
when auding [7, p. 307]:
1) The deviance of speaker’s speech
tempo (deceleration or acceleration). If the
deceleration is too strong it complicates the
perception of speech. The case is that sound
complexes of words and sentences activate
dynamic structure of notions in the cortex of
brain hemispheres. If the interval between
words is too long then side associations arise
in the consciousness. These associations im-
pede the right combination of notions. If the
intervals between words are too short then
distinction of meanings becomes difficult.
2) Incorrect attention allocation when
auding. Attention is used to concentrate on
new and unknown things. Incorrect attention
allocation is possible even when auding of
native speech [7, p. 308].
Thus, “Practical Phonetics” course has a
special role in the educational program of stu-
dents of “Translation Studies” specialty. The
learning of this course forms listening skills in
students that is important for foreign speech
perception, and forms correct pronunciation
skills which are necessary for information re-
production. Having analyzed the State Obliga-
tory Educational Standard of the Republic of
Kazakhstan it became clear that “Practical
Phonetics” discipline is not included in obliga-
tory learning component, but included in op-
tional component, i.e. university gives the list
of disciplines to students for choosing [8, p.
5]. Consequently “Practical Phonetics” disci-
pline may not be included into educational
program that may affect detrimentally on the
learning of “Oral Translation Practice” disci-
pline and professional translating activity of
the graduate. In the State Obligatory Educa-
tional Standard of the Republic of Kazakhstan
the following requirement to “Translation
Studies” graduate student is pointed out: “The
graduate should be able to use foreign lan-
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guage as a mode of communication and know
all the types of speech activity realizing oral
and written forms of communication (speak-
ing, listening, reading, writing) in the situa-
tions of official and nonofficial communicat-
ing” [8, p. 5]. In this requirement it should be
noticed such lines as “know all the types of
speech activity… (speaking, listening)…” As
was said above these skills are being acquired
when learning of “Practical Phonetics” disci-
pline. If this discipline is not included into the
list of disciplines which are obligatory for
learning then how student of “Translation
Studies” major will get basic knowledge for
learning “Oral Translation Practice” disci-
pline? It follows that “Practical Phonetics”
discipline should be included as an obligatory
component for learning of not only second
year students but first year students too.
Graduate student of “Translation Studies” spe-
cialty gets basis skills for auding during two
years of practical phonetics learning.
The course of “Practical Phonetics” dis-
cipline may be divided into several stages. The
first stage is preparatory. This is a remedial
course on which the pronunciation is training.
In his English language textbook V.D. Arakin
marked that “while working on the remedial
course it is recommended to begin every les-
son with gymnastics of organs of speech. This
gymnastics involves voiceless motional exer-
cises for tongue, lips and etc. Lessons 6 and 7
suppose the involvement of voice and pho-
netic exercises by means of words composed
by learnt vowels and consonants” [1, p. 5].
These exercises help prepare articulatory or-
gans for foreign words’ pronunciation. The
phonetic structure of the English language dif-
fers from the Russian language phonetic struc-
ture; consequently, the position of articulatory
organs of Russophones differs from articula-
tory organs of Anglophones. That is why
teachers often face difficulties when teaching
students to correct pronunciation of the words.
The second stage is transcribing texts.
Texts for transcription may be given from
books (as a visual perception) and by means of
auding (aural perception). The second case is
more complicated but has more benefits, be-
cause in this type of exercises the correctness
of aural speech perception is being checked
and correct word pronunciation is being re-
membered visually as well as aurally.
The third stage is intonation perception.
The importance of intonation learning is
marked by V.V. Sdobnikov in his “Theory of
Translation”: “Intonation has a great meaning
in the sequential translation, especially in pro-
ductive speech. Sometimes it is observed the
non-conformity of logical figure of intonation
with speech meaning content in the passive
speech. In usual conditions intonation makes it
possible to define the position of central idea
of message – in principal clause or in subordi-
nate clause. Intonations points out the comple-
tion or incompleteness of statement, its cate-
goricalness, certainty or uncertainty. Intona-
tion transmits emotionally- volitional tone of
the speech” [7, p. 296]. Thus, an interpreter
faces a problem of intonation transmitting
when interpreting. That is why the “Practical
Phonetics” course includes exercises on per-
ception of intonation that develop both listen-
ing skills and speaking skills in students of
“Translation Studies” major.
The fourth stage includes auding with
different types of assignments:
- auding with omission of words or sen-
tences. A text is being listened two or three
times, then students perform such assignments
as to mention all the numerals, adjectives,
nouns or proper nouns from the text. Perform-
ing such an assignment is forming skills of
fragmentary text comprehension that was
mentioned above.
- tests in auding text, true or false
statements from the text. These assignments
are forming skills of detailed text comprehen-
sion, i.e. student understands and remembers
not only the context of the text, but text details
as well. For example: street, where the main
character lived; the time of the day when a
particular event was happened, etc.
- listening and retelling the text on the
source language or on the target language. The
main goal for student is to convey the precise
meaning of a text.
- listening clear text or text with hin-
drances. It is important to note that listening
text with hindrances should be done on the last
stage of teaching auding because this assign-
ment is quite complicated and the correct text
comprehension in such conditions is possible
after training clear text listening.
Teachers can use not only texts from
audio CD disks which are attached to text-
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