Abstract
I have been teaching interpretation (oral translation) at the National Kaohshiung First Technology University. The aim of my department is to train students in their second language expertise. Most of my students have been studying Japanese for 3 to 5 years since junior college. In Taiwan, the pedagogy of Japanese does not start until college or university, and students start with the basics. Consequently, it is difficult to teach interpreting skills in the junior and senior years. Nevertheless, I believe that interpreting skills can be used to enhance their ability in the acquisition of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translating/interpreting skills. On this pretext, I wish to discuss the outcome of having taught my students interpreting skills to enhance their abilities to speak, listen, read, and write in Japanese after a year of instruction. I hope that language teachers in Taiwan will be able to develop a comprehensive foreign language curriculum that is tailored to the language needs of Taiwan, so as to train language specialists that will meet the demands of the society.
