Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation Practical English Conversation

Author: Liu Hong, edited by Chen Xiangguo
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2001-10-01
Features: Foreign Trade Spoken English is one of the core courses in foreign trade vocational schools across the country and all similar higher vocational and technical colleges. However, for many years, there has been no unified textbook for this course, with schools using a variety of different materials, lacking standardization. To address this issue, the Foreign Trade Vocational Education Teaching Guidance Committee of the Ministry of Commerce held a meeting in Dalian in 2001, where the Foreign Language Working Committee organized schools to compile this "Practical English for Foreign Trade." This textbook is up-to-date, comprehensive, and appropriately challenging, making it suitable for students in foreign trade majors (or international business majors) at secondary vocational schools, as well as foreign trade English majors (or international business English majors). It can also be used by students in related fields at higher vocational and technical colleges.
The textbook begins with welcoming foreign guests at the airport, proceeds through daily reception and various stages of business negotiations, and concludes with seeing off foreign guests at the airport, totaling 20 lessons. Each lesson is divided into five parts: Text, Vocabulary, Notes, Exercises, and Related Terms. The text generally consists of three to four dialogues. The Notes section includes numerous example sentences to help students understand the text through self-study. The Exercises section is quite rich in content, covering five major parts: sentence pattern drills, single-sentence interpretation, dialogue interpretation, situational dialogues or role-playing, and story retelling. Some lessons also add other types of exercises based on different situations. Starting from Lesson 11, speech exercises are included, progressing from easy to difficult, aiming to improve students' oral organizational skills in English. Additionally, there are exercises related to world-renowned companies, brands, port names, and personal names to broaden students' knowledge. Detailed notes and rich exercises are the two main features of this book.
Because the format of a textbook directly affects teaching methods, oral English teaching in China has become like intensive reading for many teachers, with teachers doing most of the explaining and students getting little practice, failing to achieve the goal of improving oral skills. This textbook, through detailed notes, allows students to understand the text and learn the usage of key language points even without teacher explanation. At the same time, the abundant exercises provide teachers with various practice materials, enabling students to train repeatedly and truly achieve the "less explanation, more practice" principle that everyone emphasizes but is difficult to implement in oral English teaching.