A differentiated approach to the design and implementation of assessment in pre-service philologists' translation training

Abstract

The given article aims at defining prospective ways of assessment differentiation in pre-service philologists' translation training under the conditions of domestic higher educational establishments. Its topicality is caused by the limited contact hours allocated for translation courses, difficulty of objective and comprehensive evaluation of both process and product of translation task performance, significant need for strengthening summative assessment function with its formative potential, multi-leveled proficiency of the student's cohorts and high tempos of machine translation and AI-tools development. The achievement of the set aim is based on the critical analysis and generalization of scientific researches devoted to the issues of differentiated instruction in teaching foreign language aspects and speech activities, transfer and adaptation of the received outcomes in the light of assessment implementation in the translation classroom. The conducted research allowed us to define such assessment elements to be differentiated in translation assessment as assessment constucts, which affect the features and content of the translation task; assessment process, which is determined by the indicators and components of a translation brief and provided scaffolding; assessment agents, evaluation methods and feedback peculiarities; terms and conditions of translation task performance as well as algorithms to respond pre-assessment results. In its turn, students' grouping in differentiated assessment should be conducted on the basis of the following criteria: their affective and emotional peculiarities, levels of their source and target language proficiency as well as translation competence; their individual learning styles. The consideration of these criteria allowed us to single out motivating, formative and regulatory types of differentiation in the assessment of pre-service philologists' translation competence. Their content and prospective ways of implementation were specified. The suggested framework of assessment differentiation should intensify its formative impact on heterovalent students' cohort in terms of their individual learning and training characterisitics.