Narrating a Student's Technological Courage: A Narrative Inquiry into Meaning-Making through Consecutive Interpreting Application Development
Abstract
Previous research on technology in interpreter education has focused primarily on institutionally provided tools and measurable skill outcomes, leaving a gap regarding how student-created technology shapes the creator's own meaning-making and professional identity. This narrative inquiry addressed that gap by asking: how does one student narrate her experience of developing and presenting a custom consecutive interpreting application within a classroom setting? The study focused on a single seventh-semester student in the English Education program at Institut Pendidikan Indonesia Garut (IPI Garut) who independently designed a consecutive interpreting application using MIT App Inventor. Data were collected through structured written reflections guided by Thiel's (1999) reflective framework on critical incidents and two semi-structured interviews, then analyzed using Özyıldırım's (2009) structural narrative analysis and Bamberg's (2024) positioning theory. The findings, organized around five thematic categories, indicated that the development process fostered progressive confidence development, deepened procedural understanding of consecutive interpreting, expanded awareness of audience dynamics and classroom setting, required negotiation of technical limitations and speech-rate timing, and catalyzed identity reconstruction from a compliance-oriented student to an agency-oriented innovator. The participant reported in her reflective accounts and interviews that the interface felt intuitive during classroom demonstration, though she negotiated processing delays, background noise, and attentional demands throughout the presentation.
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References
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.31004/jele.v11i5.3234
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