ABSTRACT

Concerns about poor L1 reading skills in undergraduate students have been expressed in several contexts. These skills form a basis for building robust L2 reading comprehension skills, vital for translators. This study, which is part of a larger organization-based action research study to improve L1 reading levels, aimed to explore how L1 reading comprehension skills were reflected and predicted the overall academic performance of students on a South American undergraduate translator training programme using regression modelling. Seventy-nine students from second, third and fourth year of the programme were recruited for this study. They were asked to take a standardized Spanish reading comprehension test measuring word-level comprehension, sentence-level comprehension and text-level comprehension. Also, participants’ final grades for all completed courses were obtained, as well as students’ scores in a pre-entry English test providing a baseline level L2 knowledge prior to being formally trained on English. The results showed that students’ overall grades were predicted by and correlated with lower order sentence-level reading skills, rather than higher-order text-level skills, which was found to be of some concern inasmuch as the translation process demands reading skills that go well beyond the sentence boundary. Given the impact that evaluation can have on student learning, and that the connection between reading comprehension and academic results on translation programs does not appear to have been considered in the literature previously, the study may highlight a need for other institutions wishing to improve L1 reading skills to similarly examine their summative evaluation practices.

摘要

在几种情况下，人们对本科生的母语阅读能力差表示了担忧。这些技能构成了构建强大的L2阅读理解技能的基础，这对于翻译人员至关重要。这项研究是一项较大的基于组织的，旨在提高L1阅读水平的行动研究的一部分，旨在探讨如何反映L1阅读理解技能，并使用回归模型预测南美本科翻译培训课程中学生的整体学习成绩。从该计划的第二，第三和第四年开始招募了79名学生进行这项研究。他们被要求参加标准的西班牙语阅读理解测试，以测试单词水平理解，句子水平理解和文本水平理解。也，获得了所有已完成课程的参与者的最终成绩，以及在参加正式英语培训之前提供的基础L2知识的入学前英语测试中的学生分数。结果表明，学生的整体成绩是由低级句子水平的阅读技能而不是高阶文本水平的技能预测的，并且与之相关联，这被认为与翻译过程中需要的阅读能力相关，这引起了一定的关注远远超出了句子的界限。鉴于评估可能会对学生的学习产生影响，并且以前在文献中似乎没有考虑过阅读理解与翻译课程的学术成果之间的联系，