towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

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CHAPTER 4
THE VALUE OF TRANSLATION AS A TESTING
INSTRUMENT
It has already been noted that translation plays
a
substantial role in the teaching of EL I classes at the UFPB,where
the students are studying English as a means to other ends than
those of a normal Humanities course.
The usual procedure is for the teacher to read through
the texts, which are normally related in a general way to the
students' main disciplines, drawing attention to difficult
vocabulary items and points of grammar, after which the students
are divided into groups to make a translation of the text.
The
teacher is then able to go from group to group offering help
where
necessary.
As the whole purpose of this dissertation is to examine
the errors that students tend to make in this kind of translation
-exercise, it is perhaps necessary to justify
the use of
translation in this way. Since the days of the reaction
against
the Grammar-Translation approach to teaching languages, the
word translation has itself come into disrepute and thus may need
to be defended
here.
No one is inclined to support Grammar-Translation
as
a teaching method these days, but the use of translation as an
evaluation procedure is a different matter. There are of
course,
many reasons for testing and various ways of doing it. Corder 2
emphasizes several aspects. He notes that, for instance,
objective tests are usually intended to measure the learner's
"grammatical competence rather than his global communicative