Prof. Rachel Herring from Century College’s TRIN program attended Katherine Allen‘s workshop on note-taking and here are her thoughts:
Notes and reflections on Katherine Allen’s workshop titled “Note-Taking for Dialogue Interpreting Settings: Adapting Long-Consecutive Techniques.”
This workshop was a great mix of presentation by the workshop leader and opportunities for participants to practice. Katherine gave an overview of the similarities and differences between long consecutive and dialogic consecutive. She placed great deal of emphasis on the importance of ongoing practice for developing and maintaining note-taking skills. This relates to the discussion of deliberate practice from the seminar given by Barbara Moser-Mercer on Wednesday, which Professor Mazzei discussed in a previous post (it’s also a concept which TRIN 2022 students will recognize!). Deliberate practice, by which we mean long-term, focused, reflective work aimed at improving performance at a skill, is a prerequisite to developing expertise in any skill.
Katherine also reminded us that regression is a normal part of beginning to learn a new skill. The new skill occupies a disproportionate amount of cognitive energy, which leaves us less cognitive energy to perform other aspects of the task (for example, learning to take notes initially leaves us less cognitive capacity for listening and analysis). We must be aware of this so that we don’t get discouraged when at first we seem to have forgotten what we used to know how to do quite well. Keep practicing through the regression and initial difficulty—as the skill becomes more automatic and integrated, you will start making progress again. Never hesitate to talk with your peers and/or instructors if you become discouraged or need help in setting goals for practice with note-taking or any other skill!
Apart from the importance of automation and practice, Katherine also touched on the great importance of context for understanding meaning—and thus the need for preparation and activation of passive knowledge.
During the workshop we practiced our note-taking skills and discussed some strategies for placement and arrangement of notes (verticality, horizontal shift, links, etc) and creation of symbols and abbreviations. Professor Mazzei has tweeted a picture of one page of my notes; I would be happy to take pictures of all the pages of notes I took and do a self-assessment/think-aloud protocol of them if the TRIN students are interested.
Towards the beginning of her presentation, Katherine led us in an activity that demonstrated the difficulties of being interrupted frequently during speech, as an example of how both service providers and clients might feel if the interpreter interrupts constantly. The ‘interpreters’ felt rude when they interrupted too often—this feeling, as Katherine pointed out, might lead interpreters to NOT interrupt and thus not be as accurate as possible. On the other hand, the ‘service providers’ felt that they were losing their train of thought, leaving out important information, and getting frustrated when they were interrupted constantly. Katherine suggested that this is an important reminder of the need for dialogic interpreters to develop note-taking skills so they can handle longer chunks of discourse. To this I would add the importance of continual development of listening and analysis skills, as well.
