Topic: Problems and Solutions of Translation in Reading at EFL situation

Now I am pondering over the problems of translation in reading, especially when the reader is a non-native speaker such as a Korean student. Some of the problems includes:

(1) They try to decode every word into their own mother tongue.
(2) They tend to stop and look at every word to decode it.
(3) They try to rearrange all the decoded words of each sentence in the order of their own syntax so as to get the whole meaning of the sentence in their own language.
(4) So they are naturally inclined to do lots of back skipping while reading sentences.
(5) In the end, they are likely to lose concentration, to mentally drift away and to lose the meaning of what they are reading. As a result, the text they are reading comes to be boring and makes no sense to the poor reader who puts his focus on decoding and translating the text into his own language that he thinks is meaningful.

Therefore, if we language teachers adopt the translatin method for language teaching or learning, we are highly likely to help our learners destruct their real competence of English.

If you have any other ideas about the problems of tranlsation in reading at the EFL situation, please let me know that. I promise I'll put all the summary here.

P.S.: If you have any solutions for the problems, please append them to your letter.

Thanks a lot in advance.

--
Chun Gab Kim,
Department of English Language and Literature
Seonam University
720 Kwangchi, Namwon 590-711
Chonbuk, Korea

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