How to Cultivate Students’ Competence of Spoken English in Middle Schools1.doc

怎样培养中学生的口语能力How to Cultivate Students Competence of Spoken English in Middle SchoolsAbstract: With the rapid development of international communication and cooperation in all kinds of fields in China, English has become one of the international languages. So it is necessary to foster students to grasp more language abilities. It is not only the main way of acquiring language information，but also the base of improving other skills. During the English teaching, it is important for teachers to master the strategies of spoken English. Therefore, the current English teaching in middle schools is faced with an important and inevitable problem which is the cultivation of students competence of spoken English. English teaching in middle schools as a long-standing ills that students have a solid foundation of knowledge and basic skills, but lack the ability to speak. The current English teaching reform to deepen must first explore the problem that how to cultivate students communicative competence in spoken English teaching. This paper is concerned with the problems of the spoken English teaching in the middle schools which are in the second part of the paper and the explanations of the cultivation of oral communication ability in the third part of the paper. For example, the problems are the neglect of speaking, barriers on lacking self-confidence and poor spoken English. Also the learning strategies are various practical methods of spoken English, the avoidance of foreign language anxiety of students, motivation of English learners in middle schools and so on.Key words: middle schools；English；spoken English teaching；communicative competence摘要：随着国际交往与合作在我国各领域的快速发展，英语逐渐成为国际通用语之一,所以说对学生语言能力的要求也是非常有必要的。口语教学既是一种语言教学,也是一种技能的培养。在英语教学中，教师掌握口语教学的策略也显得尤为重要。因此，培养学生的口语表达能力是当前中学英语教学面临的一个不可回避的重要课题。中学英语教学长期存在的一个弊病就是学生有比较扎实的基础知识和基本技能，但缺乏开口能力。如何在口语教学中培养学生交际能力，这是当前深化中学英语教学改革必须首先探究的问题。作者在文中第二部分对中学英语教学中存在的问题，例如在英语教学中对口语的忽视，缺乏自信心和薄弱的口语水平等。以及文中第三部分对中学生口语能力的培养及学习策略，例如各种练习口语的方法，克服口语学习的焦虑，学习英语的动机和英语自主学习的能力等做了具体阐述。关键词：中学；英语；口语教学；交际能力ContentsI. Introduction.1II. Problems of Spoken English Teaching in Middle Schools.2A. The neglect of speaking.21. Teacher-centered teaching methods.22. Textbooks used in most schools involving very few speaking activities.2 3. The influence of English tests.2B. Barriers of lacking of self-confidence.3 C. Barriers of poor level of spoken English.3 1. Poor pronunciation and sounds.32. Poor vocabulary and grammar43. Poor cultural background.4III. The Guidance of Learning Strategies. .5A. Various practical methods of spoken English.51. Imitation52. Retelling.5B. The avoidance of foreign language anxiety of students.5C. Motivation of English learners in middle schools.6D. The ability of English autonomic learning among students.6E. The environment of learning English and the interactive language teaching.7IV. Approaches of Developing the Spoken English in Middle Schools.7A. Letting the students develop good habits71. Doing drills practice.82. Doing pre-communicative activities8B. Letting the students talk.91. Creating a comfortable atmosphere .92. Giving students chances to speak93. Giving the students interesting topics.94. Correcting the students errors10C. Integrating speaking with other three basic skills101. Integrating speaking with listening102. Integrating speaking with reading113. Integrating speaking with writing12V. Conclusion13Work Cited14. IntroductionThe purpose of middle school English teaching is to improve the students four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing with the base of necessary phonetics, large vocabulary and good grammar, but this is not the final purpose. The final purpose is to let students have ability to use the language. Now most of the students do better in reading and writing than in listening and speaking. They can read and write, but they can hardly communicate. They can hardly express themselves with their own words. This is partially due to our examination system, and partially due to the teaching methods. We can not change the examination system, but we can improve our teaching methods.With the popularization of English learning, the core of English teaching in China has transferred from input-language to output-language, that is, simple understanding competence of teaching turns to the cultivation of comprehensive competence of expressing language. There are two types of language expression, spoken English and written English, in which spoken English is the first and the basis of written English. Spoken English is an individual and technical course, which especially cultivates spoken expression and communicative competence (Liu 2). Its main task is to develop technical practice by language function and fixed topics, in order to develop a right conversation about daily life, and make a coherent speech about social life, which demands to express definitely and make a correct speech sounds and intonation and a proper sentence. However, in the past, English teaching lacked sufficient knowledge to students competence of spoken language in China and did not realize the importance, thus leading to students poor spoken English, poor communicative competence of spoken English and that is too difficult to meet the situation of the reform and opening-up policy. And the phenomena have evoked the attention of some department and society. A series of measures of teaching reform have been put into effect one after another. Generally speaking, the strength of expressive competence, especially, the cultivation of communicative competence of spoken English, has become the emphasis and development direction at present. Actually, spoken English is not difficult for us, but it is not so easy to speak English fluently in different situations. Therefore, during the English teaching, it is important to cultivate the students communicative competence of spoken English. Problems of English Teaching in Middle SchoolsIn middle schools, teachers think that teaching English is just to teach vocabulary and grammar. So, English teaching only lays stress on analyzing grammar structures and explaining lots of language knowledge, which give students many difficulties in learning English. As English majors, we should solve some problems first during the English teaching. Wilga M. Rivers, who was famous for his foreign language teaching methods in America, pointed out in his “ Principles of Second Language and Teaching ”, that listening occupied 45 while speaking was 30, reading was 16 and writing was 9 during the communicative activity for a person (Rivers M. 26). Listening is very important for us and occupied 45, but speaking also becomes very important in our daily life, and it is the weakest link in English learning . So we must pay more attention to speaking and the problems we have in spoken English. It indicates that obstacles appear in the spoken English intercommunication because of the neglect of speaking, lacking self-confidence, poor spoken English and so on.A. The neglect of speakingSpeaking is commonly neglected in classrooms in China. Our students can do quite well in examinations, but they can not answer very simple questions in English. The problem is serious and it demands urgent attention and immediate action. There are three main reasons for the neglect of speaking in Chinese English classrooms.1. Teacher-centered teaching methods. In teacher-centered classes students are completely controlled by teachers and rarely have opportunity to practice speaking. The only chances the students get are reading the text or vocabulary aloud ,or making up sentences with newly learnt phrases or words. 2. The textbooks used in most schools involving very few speaking activities. Speech work is a vital language skill. (Grant 34) Yet it is very difficult for teachers to design speaking activities independently. After observing the demonstration given by one of our British experts, the teacher said: “I agree that these oral activities are well-organized and they are very interesting and motivating. But it is difficult for us to do this; we can not afford time to design such activities. ”3. The influence of the Band 4 and Band 6 tests and English tests. In these tests students grammar, listening, reading and writing are examined. There is no requirement for speaking. A typical test paper tests: Listening comprehension; Reading comprehension; Vocabulary and structure; Cloze; and Writing. As a result, students focus all their attention and energy on other language skills, not on speaking. B. Barriers of lacking of self-confidence.One of the aims of learning English is to communicate with others. However, we are terrified of speaking with strangers or foreigners in English. Sometimes, most of us will be over-nervous and play abnormal, which leads to failure (Hao 32). Spoken English demands us to communicate with people face-to-face. To some extent, it may bring us psychological pressure. At this time, it is necessary for us to hold an easy frame of mind. If you want to have a successful conversation with others in English, it is very important to have a good state while you are speaking. Because spoken English is a very complex psychological process. Linguistics tells us that it is easy for one to produce frights when he is at his nervousness. During the process of speaking English, the students may find some familiar contents become unfamiliar because of the intense and feelings. Frightened psychology is a barrier of dealing with high efficiency. Generally speaking, the more confidence we feel, the more active we will become. If you are faced with some new words, phrases or sentence patterns, do not get too nervous. In a way, excellent factors are the best key to success.C. Barriers of poor spoken English.1. Poor pronunciation and soundsPronunciation and sounds is one of the basic factors of spoken English. Some students have poor English standard pronunciation, and there is a gap between their own pronunciation and standard pronunciation (Bi 18). If you make wrong pronunciation and sounds, how do others understand what you say? Similarly, if you make wrong pronunciation and sounds, how do you know what others say? So we must make standard pronunciation in order to make ourselves understood and make others understand. We must learn English sounds well and discriminate each of them, especially, the similar sounds such as “ship and sheep”, “sixteen and sixty”. If we make wrong sounds, the listeners will misunderstand you. So we must make right sounds. English also has homophones, homonyms and complete homonyms as well as Chinese. We should pay more attention to them. Homophones are some words with different meanings, which are pronounced in the same way but with different spelling. For example, “write” and “right”, “rain” and “reign”, “night” and “knight” are all homophones. When two words are identical in spelling, they are homographs. That is to say, words have the same sounds and usually the same spelling as another, though different in meaning or origin. Such as the verb “tear” and the noun “tear”, the verb “lead” and the noun “lead”. When two words are identical in both sounds and spelling, they are complete homonyms. For example, the adjective “fast” and the verb “fast”, the noun “scale” and the verb “scale” (Yang 79-80). We need to spend a lot of time rehearsing. The more we do that, the more we pick up when we hear the desired sounds. And of course the other thing about pronunciation is, as we improve our pronunciation we also improves our comprehension. As we learn to make this distinction between similar sounds, we start hearing them and that makes understanding easier. One of the biggest problems in English is that the spelling gets in the way because there are so many ways of spelling the same sounds (Barrutia 32). Also because letters may be written and not pronounced and because letters may be written and pronounced in a very unexpected way. When we learn to read, that can interfere with our pronunciation, and can cause problems in itself. 2. Poor vocabulary and grammarAs some linguistic experts say, “Without grammar, little can be conveyed. Without words, nothing can be conveyed. ” (Brazil 14) It is not enough to learn plentiful linguistic knowledge. Abundant vocabulary plays an important role in speaking process. During the process of speaking conversation, we should not only make sounds recognition, but also learn more vocabulary. So does the grammar. Grammar can help us to catch the implication of the vocal sounds, and understand them well. Grammar is also the essential condition of a whole speaking conversation with others (Hao 65).3. Poor cultural backgroundCultural background is an important factor for us to improve our spoken English. It is necessary to know some background knowledge about English-speaking countries, such as history, politics, economy, culture, customs and habits, even life styles etc (Wang 72). For example, there are two topics to talk about, one is the Spring Festival and the other is Thanksgiving Day. It is sure that we know more about the Spring Festival than Thanksgiving Day because the Spring Festival is our own traditional festival in China, and everyone knows it well and we live in the atmosphere, and we have a profound impression about it. On the contrary, Thanksgiving Day is a typical American holiday, and we know little about it because we are not familiar with the background of Thanksgiving Day and it is not easy for us to understand. So cultural background is very important to understand what others say. III. The Guidance of Learning StrategiesA. Various practical methods of spoken English1. ImitationIt is more efficient for the ones who do not learn very well. In order to improve spoken English, students can listen to some interesting English stories, and imitate them frequently. In the process of imitation, we must grasp the stress of sentences and be familiar with the intonation. That can not only improve learners learning interests and the enlargement of knowledge, but also reach the purpose of correct speech sounds and intonation. Stude