The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2020 - 26

THREE PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS TO TAKE YOUR ONLINE TRANSLATION
AND INTERPRETING COURSES TO THE NEXT LEVEL continued
a minimum number of peers, asking for clarifications and
critically evaluating the pros and cons of their peers' strategies.
Figure 2 below shows an excerpt from a thread discussing
the translation of an acronym (FERPA) in a university employee
manual. In this thread, Student A indicates where she found her
French translation and gives her opinion about the authority of
the web resource she found online, although she doesn't explain
to her peers why it qualifies as a reliable resource. Student
B details her step-by-step translation strategy (i.e., what she
did)-leaving the original acronym in English and inserting a
footnote with an explanation. However, she doesn't justify any
of her decisions. Student C explains and justifies her entire stepby-step process: 1) she states that she looked for extralinguistic
information about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy
Act (FERPA) on the U.S. Department of Education's website,
2) points out that multiple French-language websites leave the
acronym FERPA in the body of the text while explaining what
the law is about, and then 3) explains her own strategy, backing
it up with contextual information about the end user(s) of
the translation.
In this design, the instructor's role is mainly one of an
observer, making sure that netiquette is applied and that
discussions are progressing in the right direction. The
instructor's intervention is limited to providing a few
comments and replying to the occasional student-to-instructor
question. Progress, in the form of depth of critical and
analytical thinking, happens through peer emulation and
social comparison. Students choose peers as a yardstick to
measure their own behaviors.9 In other words, students
with the strongest analytical skills influence others as the
semester advances.
The benefits of such a discussion forum are multi-pronged.
Students can use comments to later reflect on their practice,
methodologies, strategies, and entire processes. As such, the
online forum represents an introspective tool, probably more
efficient than think-aloud protocols10, especially since students

have time to look back and select the most appropriate items
for discussion. Second, the forum also works as a collaborative
tool to collectively, and critically, think about a variety of
approaches to solve a common challenge. Finally, students can
save weekly discussions on their computers to later build their
glossaries or lists of reference materials.

VOICETHREAD: A MULTIMEDIA ENGAGEMENT TOOL
VoiceThread is an application that works exceptionally well
for student engagement and allows students to select their
preferred media for interaction.11 In contrast, many tools in
learning management systems (LMS) are based on reading,
typing, and one-way presentation of multimedia content.
For example, in a discussion forum, students and instructors
can post videos and sound files, but they cannot respond
to another person's video with a comment or video of their
own, often having to use their own audio or video capturing
program to upload such media. VoiceThread changes this.
Instructors and students can create video, audio, and textbased and slide-based presentations that become a living base
from which everyone can contribute, adding their own video,
audio, text comments, or slides. Playback doesn't have to be
linear, and replies can be threaded. (See Figure 3 on page 27.)
Because of the richness of its features, VoiceThread can
complement or replace a traditional discussion forum. In the
example given in Figure 3, it was used to replace the discussion
forum for assigned readings in a multilingual, semester-long
course. In previous semesters using traditional discussion
forums with threads, students had to write at least one post and
respond to at least two of their classmates' posts per reading.
There was a simple rubric for such posts and replies, and
while students generally met the rubric, discussion was rarely
substantial and engaging. Student contributions seemed rushed,
ill-prepared, and the product of a get-it-done mentality.
In the courses that used VoiceThread, one student was
responsible for leading the weekly discussion on the reading(s)

Figure 2: Excerpt from Student Online Discussion Forum

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