Oral English Teaching in the Middle School 中学英语口语教学

中学英语口语教学

Oral English Teaching in the Middle School

Contents

摘要................................ ............................... ................... .. (1)

关键词................................ ............................... ................... .. (1)

Abstract................................. ............................... ................... .. (1)

Key Words.............................. ............................... ................... . (1)

Introduction........................ ................................................... ............................... .. (2)

1. The characteristics of spoken language....................... .. (3)

1.1 Spontaneity...................................................... ..................... ................... .. (3)

1.2 Visual clues....................................................... ...................... .. (3)

1.3 Pronunciation.................................................................................... (4)

2. The importance of developing speaking skill................................................ (5)

2.1 Speaking and other language skills (6)

2.2 Speaking and communication................................................. ... .. (8)

3. Some factors in designing speaking activities................... .. (9)

3.1 Language proficiency level of the students........................................ (10)

3.2 Maximum foreign talk (10)

3.3 Maximum communication................................................................ .. (11)

4. The improvement of oral English.......................... .............. ..................... ............... . (12)

4.1 Analyzing psychological problems.......................................... .. (12)

4.2 Helping students form good habit......................................................... . (13)

4.3 Stimulating the students' interest...................................................... . (14)

4.4 Treating errors properly.................................................................... .. (15)

Conclusion...................................................................... ................. . (15)

Bibliography................................................................................ ........... . (16)

Acknowledgement........................................................................... ................. (17)

摘要：英语是当今世界最广泛的通用语言之一,其市场价值随着国际政治，经济，文化交流与合作的不断发展与日俱增。在21世纪的今天，随着我国改革开放步伐的加快以及国际交流的日益扩大，以口头形式进行的国际交流变得越来越重要，为了让更多的国民，尤其是青少年更好地掌握这一有效的交际工具，近年我国颁布了《中学英语新课程标准》。由此可见，如何有效地培养中学生的英语口语表达能力变得异常紧迫。

为了帮助学生提高口语，教师应该研究学生的心理问题，帮助学生养成良好的听说习惯，用不同的角色表演来激发学生的兴趣，有效的处理误差，使口语课能成为提高和扩展文化知识的有价值的课程，进而增加学生说英语的信心，提高学生的口语表达能力。教师还可进一步探讨我国中学生口语教学的现状及对策，以求最终提高中学生的语言表达与交际能力。

关键词:口语教学；交际能力；策略

Abstract: English is the most widely used language at present time in the world, its market value is becoming more and more important with the development of international politics, economics and cultural communications and co-operations. In the 21st century, oral communications between countries is becoming more and more common with the quickening of china's reform and the extension of international communications. In order to make more people, especially the youth master the effective communicative tool better, the our government has published The Standard Of New Course In Middle School. Obviously, it is very urgent to develop oral English communicative competence effectively in the middle school.

In order to help students improve their oral English, the teacher should analyze the students' psychological problems, help the students form a good habit of listening and speaking, play different roles to stimulate students interest, deal with student errors effectively, make oral English class become a valuable class to broaden their knowledge improve their confidence and ability to say English them. The teacher can also focus on the present situation of oral English teaching in middle school and provides some countermeasures, in order to improve the middle school students' oral English communicative competence.

Key words: oral English teaching, communicative competence, countermeasure

Introduction

Spoken English is more and more important in modern society，especially for students in middle school. In some middle schools, English is usually examined by written English, the spoken English is always ignored. Thus, most students are good at writing, but weak in speaking. Although they can try their best to pass any examination in writing English, it's difficult for them to communicate with others in English. So it is necessary to improve their English speaking ability.

The process of learning to speak effective English is long and requires constant practice. Associated listening tapes contain dialogue that is too fast for students to follow and a vocabulary that is inappropriate, Because of these shortcoming in the teaching material and well-developed program of oral English training, there is a pressing need to improve oral English programs around viand and to establish a standard teaching methodology, textual materials and assessment procedures that will provide all students with the opportunity to significantly improve their level of spoken English and to properly measure that improvement.

1. The characteristics of spoken language

Obviously the first impression of a person is based on his /her ability to speak fluently and comprehensibly. Spoken language not only has the common characteristics of language, but also has its own original characteristics, which includes spontaneity, visual clues and pronunciation.

1.1 Spontaneity

One of the characteristics of spoken language in everyday life is that spoken language is spontaneous. On one hand, in the most situations, people do not plan ahead of time what they are going to say only in more formal situations, such as when a person has been asked to give a speech, do people plan and organize their speech, The fact that speech is spontaneous means that it is full of false starts, repetitions, incomplete sentences in the language classroom? Bygate [1] points out that teacher may be requiring their students to do more forward -thinking and planning than native speakers do in real life! On the other hand, the producing spoken language is the time-constraint, the students must be able to produce unplanned utterances in real time; otherwise people will not have the patience to listen to them.

1.2 Visual clues

Most of the time we can see the person speaking to, this means we can see their facial express gestures and other body language as well as the surroundings.

They are facial express or body movements that help us to interact with another inpidual or to regulate our conversations with him or her .They include head nods, hand gesture, shift in posture and many other forms of body movements. In normal conversations between two interlocutors there is one speaker and one hearer. When the hearer begins to speak, he or she becomes

speaker and the former speaker becomes hearer. When the speaker wants to finish his or her utterance and signal the hearer that it is his or her turn to talk, the speaker may decrease loudness, slow down tempo or simply use silence to indicate that he or she wants to stop talking for the moment. Another way to signal the hearer to speak is to stop gesticulating and to relax his or her posture. If the speaker wants to go on talking, he or she will increase loudness, decrease silent pauses, fill pauses with gestures, and avoid allowing his or her gestures to stop at the end of utterances. If the hearer wants to speak when the speaker has not yet said what he or she has to say ,he or she may use rapid head nods, say “yes”, or “I agree”more frequently, raise an index finger, take an audible breath or straighten his or her posture to show that he or she is ready to speak.

1.3 Pronunciation

In the teaching of English as a foreign language, discussions on pronuncia -tion are not so much around how to teach pronunciation as around the value of teaching pronunciation. There are some people who claim that students do not need to learn pronunciation will take care of itself as the students develop overall language ability.

Considering our English learning context, generally speaking, beginning Chinese learners of English need a certain degree of focus on pronunciation. However, great care should be taken over the distinction between pronunciation and phonetics. The teaching of pronunciation should focus on the students' ability

to identify and produce English sounds themselves, students should not be led to focus on reading and writing phonetic transcripts are more abstract and less meaningful.

When talking about pronunciation, many people automatically think of sounds and phonetic symbols and rules, Actually pronunciation is an umbrella term covering many aspects besides sounds and phonetic symbols, such as stress, intonation rhythm. Of course, these aspects are not isolated from each other. Rather, they are interrelated, For example, the word stress influences how the letters are pronounced, And the sentence stress again will make it necessary to pronounce words differently from when they are read inpidually, similarly, intonation and rhythm also cause variation in the sounds of words.

2 .The importance of developing speaking skills

Before we take count measures to help students improve their oral English, we should know the importance of developing speaking skills, which can conduct our oral English teaching.

2.1 Speaking and other language skills

Speaking is one of the important skills, which must be developed in language learning and teaching, it has been shown that practicing each of the four skills listening, speaking, reading and writing reinforced the others[2].so the development of speaking can be very helpful in developing students' reading and writing skills.

Note Professor Tang's explanation of this:

The four basic skills, of course, are all inter-related and interact with each other, as receptive skills, listening and reading naturally precede speaking and writing, they provide the means for acquiring necessary vocabulary and language structure. Listening, as the first stage of language development, forms the basis for learning to speaking and then develops continuously to support further growth in speaking. In the same way, Reading facilitates communication. Reading materials provide new terms, and a variety of sentence forms to the students' repertory of vocabulary of listening and speaking. A student with a bad pronunciation, for example, will surely have difficulty in understanding a native speaker[2].In the four basic language skills, speaking and listening are said to relate to language expressed through the aural medium while reading and writing are said to relate to language expressed through the visual medium. What is more, Speaking and writing are regarded as productive skills whereas listening and reading are regarded as receptive skills. So speaking is a kind of active and productive language skill, According to Robinett[3],speaking can be thought of as a mirror image of the listening skill and one for which the same linguistic and cultural knowledge is required. However, it is only a partial image since it involves the added problem of pronunciation, the articulator production of sounds. At the first stage of language development, listening and speaking are very closely linked, listening forms the basis for learning to speak. We cannot develop speaking skills unless we also develop listening skills. Obviously, to have a successful

conversation, students must understand what is said to them.

Some students are exposed to spoken English before they enter university. Though they can read and write at intermediate level, their listening is elementary, when they listen to the college teacher or the tape-recorder, they find that the English words they have just heard are strange and different from the ones clearly enunciated by their teachers in middle schools.

Therefore listening to spoken English is important for acquiring the language -for“picking up”structures and vocabulary. So we need to give students as much opportunity to listen to spoken English as we can. There are two kinds of listening in real life-“casual listening and focused listening”[4].Casual listening means we listen with no particular purpose in mind, such as listening to the radio, but in class, we use focused listening activities. Teachers can guide listening by giving simple listening tasks and guiding questions, pre-listening activities, predication tasks, and using cassette recorders can also enhance focused listening.

Besides being linked to listening，the development of speaking skills can increase students' enthusiasm for the whole English learning process, we know that learning a language begins with learning to speak it .Take children for example, they come to school to learn English with strong conviction of coming to learn to speak it [2], it greatly encourage them when they are found to be able to say something in English to their parents of friends, and it is human nature can speak the more interested they get in learning English.

2.2 Speaking and Communication

Recently great emphasis has been placed on oral practice as part of developing speaking skills in language teaching[5]；However, classroom exercises have tended to be mechanical drills meant to develop automatic, errorless responses to set patterns. These drills have often been referred as “pattern practice”. It is true that drills are important in language learning, but such practice needs to be made meaningful. In order to make oral practice meaningful teachers and students must realize how speaking is tied to the idea of communication.

Man cannot live without communication with each other. What is communica -tion? Communication is the periods of focusing on language form are important in foreign language learning but developing the ability to really communicate in English is the main goal of an English language course. At the end of a course, the learners should be able to communicate effectively in English outside the classroom for study, work or leisure. Communication between people is the exchange of ideas and information.

So we can say speaking skills involve the skill of communication. In the classroom, students are able to perform at there given level of English; outside the class, they are able to communicate with others to exchange ideas and information. Of course, they must use the correct pronunciation, intonation, expressions and structures.

How tightly controlled and oral practice activity is also influence its communicative value[3], controlled or guided speaking exercises usually help

students practice vocabulary and language patterns. Oral drill, answering questions based on assigned reading and structural games are some examples, controlled activities stress practice, not communicative situations in real life outside the classroom, they are those for which the teacher can prepare students but over which there is no direct control, these include role-plays and discussions[6].

3. Some factors in designing speaking activities

At present, many Chinese students especially those in countryside school all consider that spoken English as their most difficult problem. Really, due to the system of examination, whether teacher or students pay much more attention to the grammar or vocabulary. Sometime, they even ignore the importance of spoken English. However, with the frequent international communication, spoken English plays an extremely important part on our daily life. The present situation requires us to improve our spoken English level as soon as possible. As teachers, we have a responsibility to prepare the students as much as possible to be able to speak in English in the real world outside the classroom and the testing room. In the English class, teachers should design speaking activities in order to help their students speak fluently and comprehensibly. Of course, it is not an easy matter to design great speaking activities; it is often subjected to the following factors:

3.1 Language proficiency level of the students

When teachers design speaking activities, the first important consideration is the language proficiency level of the students. That is to say, when a teacher tells his/her students a topic to discuss, he/she should think that whether this topic agree with the English level of the students. Because if the topic is beyond the students' level, they will simple become frustrated and demodulated. Of course, the topic cannot be too easy. Middle school students do not have enough self-control. They are very easy to distract their attention and have a chat in the class as long as they consider that the topic is too simple. So, it is good to give the students tasks that challenge them and teacher can also write some words concerned with the topic on the blackboard. To the students, maybe these words can offer them a clue and so free-talk can be continued.

3.2 Maximum foreign talk

As foreign language learners, English is not our mother tongue and there is not good language atmosphere for us to learn English, so if you want to improve your spoken English level, you had better speak English as much as possible. One common problem in speaking activities is that students often produce one or two simple utterances in the foreign language and spend the rest of the time chatting in their native language. In class the teacher should try every effort to encourage the students and offer them chances to think and speak in English. Another common problem is that the teacher talks too much of the time, thus talking away valuable practice time from the students. Chinese is not allowed in English class: neither is

silence preferred, even if the students have no ideas, they would only be allowed to say "sorry" in English. In Chinese, the teacher might say“sorry, I do not understand Chinese, please speak in English”.It sounds like a joke, but it does help to ease the tension in class. At the end of the class, the teacher may leave ten minutes for the students the have a “hot debate”. At this lever, they may use Chinese when necessary so as to keep the discussion going. On the other hand, teachers should try their best to arouse the students' interests and stimulate them to speak in English, students' should be forbidden to chat in Chinese. And teachers can also give students English situation, so the students may brave to speak.

3.3 Maximum communication

The key assumption in communicative language teaching is that the students learn the language through engaging in a variety of communicative activities, for example: identifying pictures, discovering identical pairs, communicating patterns[7]. The aim of a communicative activity in class is to get learners to use the language they are learning to interact in realistic and meaningful ways, usually involving exchanges of information.

4 .The improvement of oral English

One of main of English teaching is improving student's oral English level. When the teachers do the pre-work, they can take some efficient ways are as follows.

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