English Speaking Course

Author: Lu Lihong, Yao Jiawu, Editors
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Speaking courses are designed to cultivate oral communication skills and provide skill training. Speaking courses are not traditional knowledge-transfer courses but rather transform students' acquired linguistic knowledge into communicative competence. It has been proven that almost no one can learn a new language and communicate fluently solely through language courses. Even for native speakers, it is the same for non-native speakers. People can communicate in a foreign language as a result of extensive real-life communication. The "comprehension process" in language learning requires a communicative environment, and communication is both the core issue and the ultimate goal of language learning. To teach students a foreign language, they must be placed in a communicative environment. This environment has three conditions: there must be a need for communication, there must be people to communicate with, and there must be communicative outcomes. Therefore, under real-world conditions, speaking instruction should strive to provide these three conditions as much as possible. Chinese English classrooms have traditionally focused on input-based foreign culture learning, especially in middle school English teaching. In college English teaching, the target audience is the adult group, who already have a certain foundation of knowledge and the ability to "process" it. If their teaching only involves input without sufficient output, it is equivalent to wasting or even depriving them of the opportunity to transform knowledge into skills. College English speaking instruction should create conditions for output, fully mobilize or utilize the knowledge students have already input, and consciously input what is lacking during the output process. Therefore, to effectively use this textbook and achieve the desired results, the authors recommend adhering to the following four principles in teaching: (1) Maximize the time students spend directly participating in classroom learning; (2) Maximize the scope of students' direct participation in classroom learning; (3) Maximize the opportunities for students to learn from each other; (4) Maximize the authenticity of students' communication. Regarding the use suggestions for certain parts of this textbook: