Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to substantiate the importance of development of specific psycho-cognitive competencies at the early stage of learning a foreign language which involves the following: to improve short-term memory and elocution of future interpreters; to develop their ability to switch promptly from one language to another; to develop the ability to work in stressful and unfavourable situations; to automatize the active vocabulary; to develop intuition and contextual guess of interpreters.

Many experts in the sphere of interpretation point to a specific peculiarity of interpretation which consists in simultaneous occurrence of all verbal and cognitive processes: auditory reception of the original message, its external encoding, internal decoding and further generation of the translation utterance (Alekseeva, Alikina, Latyshev, Miller, Minyar-Beloruchev, Rudkovskaya and others). Thus, the interpretation training strategy is determined not only by the necessity to increase the linguistic knowledge of students, but also by the need to develop their abilities and skills to consciously control and manage lingua-cognitive mechanisms.

Short-term memory plays a leading role in the interpretation practice when the original text is presented only once. The sender’s speech containing long utterances may exceed the amount of the interpreter’s short-term memory and, as a result, impede the process of the target text reproduction. Therefore, mastering of interpretation requires comprehensive and purposeful training to activate all mental mechanisms (perception, memory, attention, cogitation, probability prediction).

The authors of this study focus on two main aspects:
1. The place of exercises aimed at formation of specific psycho-cognitive competencies in the structure of the lesson;
2. The exercises that contribute to the development of specific psycho-cognitive competencies at the early stage of learning a foreign language.

The stated problem is solved with the help of the linguodidactic method which is employed to analyze the experience of Russian university teachers of German to Russian translation and interpretation who use innovative teaching techniques for development of psycho-cognitive competencies. Furthermore, the correlation method is used in order to compare the results in mid-year assessments and final exams shown by students who were trained with traditional interpretation teaching techniques and those students who regularly did exercises on formation of psycho-cognitive competencies.

The authors come to the conclusion that the quality of interpretation is directly dependent on such cognitive phenomena as short-term memory, focus and selectivity of attention, the mechanism of interlingual code switching. The authors have developed a set of exercises based on the material of the German language which contribute to formation of specific psycho-cognitive competencies of interpreters. The set of exercises includes tongue twisters, exercises on repetition of groups of numbers and combinations of numbers with nouns, exercises on precision vocabulary, mnemonic poems, echo-repetition, syntactic deployment, syntactic compression and elements of simultaneous interpretation.

Keywords:

Psycho-cognitive competence, interpretation training, teaching methods, learning a foreign language.