The effect of machine translation on Iranian EFL learners writing skill

In spite of advancements in Machine Translation (MT), this area has not been fully explored in teaching languages to students and it might be attributed to negative attitudes language teachers have toward translation in general and MT in particular. The aim of this paper was to report an experiment in which MT was used as a pedagogical tool to teach components of a foreign language to a small group of students. This mixed-method study explores the effect of teaching editing techniques in machine translation to a group of Iranian EFL university students in an academic writing course. Twenty students took part in a 4-day workshop in which one session was devoted to teaching editing techniques and three remaining sessions to the use of editing techniques. Each session consisted of a pre-test, treatment and a post-test. In addition, in each session, one key writing point, namely, determiners, paraphrasing and collocations were discussed. A questionnaire for the participants’ demographic information and another for learning experiences were administered. The results indicated a statistically significant improvement in the overall gain score. Further analysis showed a significant improvement in use of determiners in contrast to paraphrasing and collocations. Lack of improvement in paraphrasing and collocation seemed to stem from weakness in vocabulary and grammatical knowledge in both mother tongue and the target language. Analysis of questionnaire data revealed that the instruction proved to be beneficial since it could be easily implemented in correction and confirmation.