Correlating self-efficacy with self-assessment in an undergraduate interpreting classroom: How accurate can students be?

Abstract

The current paper intends to explore whether there are significant correlations between students’ self-efficacy and their self-assessment accuracy and how the former mediates the latter. Framed within an undergraduate interpreting classroom in China, which shares similar pedagogical aims with general foreign language courses, a total of 53 senior students completed an Interpreting Self-Efficacy (ISE) Scale before self-assessing their English-Chinese consecutive interpreting performance. Spearman correlation tests were employed to investigate the correlations between students’ ISE level and their self-assess-ment accuracy, compared with the teacher’s marks. Although ISE and self-assessment accuracy were positively correlated, the relation was not significant. Medium to low level ISE could only vaguely predict students’ self-assessment performance, but students were capable of accurate self-assessment regardless of their ISE level. This justifies more rigorous reflection on self-regulated learning enabled by accurate self-assessment in language class-rooms, which is simultaneously informed by multiple social and psychological variables experienced by individual learners, such as self-efficacy.