Deliberate Practice

Ideas about how practice and training can explain individual differences in attained level of performance in any domain have a long history. According to Galton’s (1869/1979) seminal book on ‘hereditary genius’, individuals will need training and practice to reach high levels of performance in any domain, but improvements in performance are eventually limited by innate factors that cannot be changed through training; hence attainable performance is constrained by one’s basic endowments, such as abilities, mental capacities, and innate talents. Ericsson called this traditional view of skill acquisition and professional development ‘the common-sense view of professional development’ (2000/01: 190).

Contemporary theories of skill acquisition (Anderson, 1982; Fitts & Posner, 1967) are consistent with Galton’s general assumptions about basic unmodifiable capacities and with observations on the general course of professional development. When individuals are first introduced to a skilled activity, their primary goal is to reach a level of proficiency that will allow them to perform these tasks at a functional level. During the first phase of learning and skill acquisition (Fitts & Posner, 1967), beginners try to understand the requirements of the activity and focus on generating actions while avoiding gross mistakes. In the second phase of learning, when people have had more experience, noticeable mistakes become increasingly rare, performance appears smoother, and learners no longer need to focus as intensely on their performance to maintain an acceptable level. After a limited period of training and experience, an acceptable level of performance is typically attained. As individuals adapt to a domain during the third phase of learning, their performance skills become automated, and they are able to execute these skills smoothly and with minimal effort. As a consequence of automatization, performers lose the ability to control the execution of those skills, making intentional modifications and adjustments difficult. In the automated phase of learning, performance reaches a stable plateau, and no further improvements are observed, which is in agreement with Galton’s (1869/1979) assumption of a performance limit.

Initially, some researchers (e.g. Simon & Chase, 1973) considered the possibility that expertise was an automatic consequence of lengthy experience, and they considered individuals with over ten years of full-time engagement in a domain to be experts. These researchers typically viewed expertise as an orderly progression from novice to intermediate and to expert, where the primary factors mediating the progression through these stages were instruction, training, and experience. However, more recent reviews (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995; Ericsson & Smith, 1991) have raised issues about this characterization of expertise. Even when individuals have access to a similar training environment, large individual differences in performance are still often observed. Furthermore, research shows that the amount of experience in a domain is often a weak predictor of performance. Rather than accepting these facts as evidence for innate differences in ability (i.e. talent), Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer (1993) tried to identify those training activities that would be most closely related to improvements in performance. On the basis of a review of research on skill acquisition, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) identified a set of conditions where practice had been uniformly associated with improved performance. They found that significant improvements in performance were realized when individuals were (1) given a task with a well-defined goal, (2) motivated to improve, (3) provided with feedback, and (4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance. Deliberate efforts to improve one’s performance beyond its current level demand full concentration and often require problem-solving and better methods of performing the tasks (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993). When all these elements are present, Ericsson and colleagues used the term ‘deliberate practice’ to characterize training activities.

Ericsson further explained how expert performers can avoid reaching a performance asymptote within a limited time period, as predicted by contemporary theories of skill acquisition and expertise, and keep improving their performance for years and decades. He proposed that aspiring experts continue to improve their performance as a function of more experience because it is coupled with deliberate practice. According to Ericsson, the key challenge for aspiring expert performers is to avoid the arrested development associated with automaticity. These individuals purposefully counteract tendencies towards automaticity by actively setting new goals and higher performance standards, which require them to increase speed, accuracy, and control over their actions. The

experts deliberately construct and seek out training situations to attain desired goals that exceed their current level of performance.

According to Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer (1993), the quantity and quality of deliberate practice is related to the attained level of performance. The amount of accumulated practice is predicted to be directly related to current levels of performance. The greatest improvements in performance are likely to be associated with the largest weekly amounts of deliberate practice. Therefore, individuals should attempt to optimize the amount of time they spend on deliberate practice to reach expert performance. Ericsson (2000/01) points out that, although the detailed characteristics of deliberate practice differ as a function of the demands on the expert performance in each domain of expertise, the best individuals have been found to engage in a greater quantity and quality of deliberate practice in a wide range of domains.

In their useful framework for looking at skill acquisition in chess, Charness, Krampe and Mayr (1996) focused on the role of deliberate practice as the primary change mechanism. They hypothesized that the cognitive system changes through practice, and that social, personality, and external factors have their impact through their influence on practising behaviours. Sternberg’s (2000, 2001) developing expertise model showed that the novice works towards expertise through deliberate practice, but that this practice requires an interaction of motivation, metacognitive skills, learning skills, thinking skills, and knowledge.

Undoubtedly, interpreting, as a complex or ‘high-performance’ skill (De Groot, 2000: 53; Sawyer, 2004: 79; Gile, 2005: 127), requires intensive and appropriate practice to achieve expertise. As Moser-Mercer (2003) has observed, trainees often spend hours every day practising, hoping that they will make good progress. They think that the more they practise, the more they will progress. Yet when they keep practising without taking a moment to reflect on their performances, they waste their effort and lose the opportunity to identify space for further improvement. The concept of ‘deliberate practice’ emphasizes the importance of students monitoring their learning so that they seek feedback and actively evaluate their strategies and current levels of understanding. Such activities are very different from simply repeating the same exercise over and over again, or doing ‘mileage’ in interpreting practice that emphasizes quantity of the learning experience over quality (Moser-Mercer, 2008).

Aldea (2008) suggests that the distinction between sterile practice and deliberate practice should be made clear to trainees from the very beginning. It is undeniable that interpreting trainees are usually highly motivated and willing to work the extra hours necessary for honing their skills. The danger, according to Ericsson (2000/01), lies in the fact that once a basic level of mastery is achieved, activities become routine and development is completely arrested. Aldea (2008) warns that interpreters may spend not months, but years in the booth and still fail to make any progress, unless they purposefully assess their performance, diagnose problems, and seek remedial actions. According to Ericsson, ‘improvement of performance was uniformly observed when individuals who were motivated to improve their performance were given well-defined tasks, were provided with feedback, and had ample opportunities for repetition’ (2000/01: 195). Aldea (2008) suggests that in order to ensure that students’ self-study sessions are indeed objective-based deliberate practice sessions, and not just some sterile ‘let’s interpret some speeches’ sessions, some steps need to be taken, for example defining short-term objectives, preparing suitable speeches, providing objective-related feedback, and following training stages. If these criteria are met, the efficiency of the training process increases dramatically and practice becomes truly effective. On the other hand, Ericsson suggests that training sessions should be ‘limited to around an hour—the time that college students could maintain sufficient concentration to make active efforts to improve’ (2000/01: 195).

In sum, researchers of expert performance have found that all experiences are not equally helpful and there are qualitative differences between activities loosely referred to as ‘practice’ in terms of their ability to improve performance (Plant et al., 2005). The effects of mere experience differ greatly from those of deliberate practice, where individuals concentrate on actively trying to go beyond their current abilities. The study of deliberate practice will enhance our knowledge about how experts optimize the improvements of their performance (and motivation) through the high level of daily practice they can sustain for days, months, and years. The emerging insights should be relevant to any motivated individual aspiring to excel in any challenging domain (Ericsson, 2006).

On the other hand, some researchers (e.g. Sternberg, 1996, 1998) have cautioned that there is a need to counter extreme positions such as the view that deliberate practice is everything, or almost everything. Sternberg (1998) suggested that Ericsson and his colleagues’ work in deliberate-practice studies shows a correlation between focused

practice and expertise but it does not show a causal relation. He agreed that it seems unquestionable that deliberate practice plays a role in the development of expertise, but he pointed out that it also seems extremely likely that its role is that of a necessary rather than a sufficient condition. Sternberg (1996, 2001) suggests that very high levels of expertise require native ability, talent and deliberate practice, rather than only deliberate practice. As he put it, ‘without the ability, hours of practice can be for minimal or no rewards’ (1996: 349). However, Ericsson (2000/01) suggested that Sternberg’s view only represented the enduring common-sense view of professional development which is still advocated by the main contemporary theories of human ability (Ericsson, 2000/01: 190). He claimed that the empirical evidence backing the common-sense view of professional development was surprisingly limited and sometimes even inconsistent with the assumptions of this view of expert performance (2000/01: 190).

Furthermore, Shreve (2002) pointed out that conference interpreting is, at least in some aspects, quite unlike a number of cognitive skill domains (e.g. chess) in that it involves human language. The cognitive abilities and structures that underlie human language are of a quite different nature from the skills related to games or other domains. It remains for us, as interpreting researchers, to determine which aspects of interpreting expertise can be improved by deliberate long-term practice and which are dependent on other factors less amenable to improvement because they are dependent on innate or genetically determined human linguistic abilities (Shreve, 2002: 169).