187 / 2018-08-14 17:16:59

Assessment Task Validation based on the AUA Framework : The Case of the Summary Interpreting (E-C) Task in TTIM-8 (English Interpreting)

retelling; BTI; TTIM-8; Summary Interpreting (E-C); AUA

Retelling competence, as a preparatory competence for the development of interpreting competence, is one of the key issues in BTI teaching and learning. For a long time, there was no specific test to assess students’ retelling competence in China. In this context, the Summary Interpreting task has been set in TTIM-8 (English Interpreting) as an innovative task to assess BTI students’ preparatory competence for interpreting. It aims to guide BTI interpreting teaching and learning to follow the law of interpreting competence development so as to improve the effectiveness of BTI interpreting education. As an innovative task, however, the validity of the Summary Interpreting task is necessarily to be justified before the task being officially put into use. Under such circumstances, this study has researched into the validity of the Summary Interpreting (E-C) task in TTIM-8 (English Interpreting) through the analysis of raters’ rating procedure, test takers' answering procedure and test takers' scores on the basis of the Assessment Use Argument (AUA) framework put forward by Bachman and Palmer in 2010.
The researcher firstly clarified the construct of the Summary Interpreting (E-C) task and then invited 2 experienced raters and 26 BTI (3rd year) students as research subjects. Through discourse analysis of 2 raters' verbal reports and test takers' verbal reports and text feature analysis of transcriptions of test takers' Summary Interpreting (E-C) recordings, this study concludes that the interpretations about the ability to be assessed in the Summary Interpreting (E-C) task are meaningful in aspects of raters’ rating procedure, test takers' answering procedure and test takers' scores.