Abstract
With an ever-decreasing number of students enrolling on UK undergraduate courses in foreign languages, universities are faced with a smaller pool of students from which to recruit, and many of these students enter higher education with poor foreign language skills. Students need to have reached a high level of competence in their foreign language(s) (L2) as well as their mother tongue (L1), and this is all the more important in interpreting. It therefore seems that undergraduate interpreter training needs to address the dual needs of students in this situation, that is to say, the need to acquire interpreting skills, but also to enhance their foreign language skills. A promising resource comes from the use of spoken corpora. This research describes a corpus-based approach to the training of undergraduate students in four case studies conducted at the University of Surrey using the German, French and English components of the BACKBONE corpus, a multilingual pedagogic corpus with audio-visual content. Language based and interpreting exercises were created on the basis of video interviews on the topic of education, and used to train students in class and during self-study. To track the students' progress, their interpreting performance was tested at the beginning and at the end of the study. The participants also completed a terminology pre- and post-test, with a range of terms related to education in each language, all of which were extracted from the corpus. In order to explore the students' methods of working with the corpus and associated exercises, the participants also completed a written assignment, in which they evaluated their performance in the interpreting posttest. Finally, the students were asked to complete a questionnaire, in order to further exemplify the main ways of exploiting the materials, and to gather feedback about the resources from the students' perspective. The findings show that the corpus-based materials aided the students in improving their knowledge of subject-specific terminology, providing an abundance of interpreting and language practice materials which can be used independently. The results also indicate that the students favoured the discourse-based functionality of the corpus, preferring to use whole-text and whole-corpus methods, rather than the more traditional functions, such as concordances and keyword lists. Furthermore, there is evidence that the resources used here promoted autonomous learning behaviours, placing the student at the centre of a learner-led approach to training.