Student Perceptions towards Task-Based Learning in a Student-Centered Translation Classroom

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate teaching and learning management in translation classroom. The research study is designed to engage students in a translation class, investigating their behaviors and attitudes towards a student-centered classroom in which implementation of activities based on a task-based learning approach is applied. Based on the researchers’ experiences, teaching translation skills has mostly been in a teacher-centered classroom environment.  Although students are assigned to do exercises a lot, an instructor is still the center of the classroom. An instructor usually plays a major role in class giving a lecture, answering and explaining exercises, analyzing errors and important issues, and giving feedback to students, etc. Hereby, the researchers are interested in developing an effective teaching method in teaching translation skills in order to successfully enhance students’ learning and development. In this study, the participants were 97 students in English major and 5 instructors taught in translation courses.  The instruments of this research study were 1) a classroom observation, 2) a student questionnaire, 3) a student semi-interview, and 4) an instructor semi-structure interview. In analyzing the collected data, the statistics used were frequency and percentage. In analyzing the data from the interviews, content analysis and thematic analysis were applied. The findings were as follows. 1) The satisfaction of the majority of the participants in implementing a task-based approach into a translation classroom in general was at the very high level (x̄ = 4.72). 2) The findings revealed low satisfaction level on the instructor dimension (x̄ = 2.56).  3) The instructors of the translation classes agreed that the student participants found some difficulties in learning translation through the task-based approach. The difficulties were generally driven from that 1) their activeness and enthusiasm in self-learning was in a low level, 2) they tended to get used to a teacher-based learning environment and 3) they were afraid of providing wrong ideas or answers.