A Research On Non-English Majors' Learning Difficulties In Oral English And The Corresponding Teaching Strategies

Spoken language is the basic form of a language. As far as a language's origin, development and application are concerned, spoken language should be given priority to. In English learning , most of the non-English majors' oral competence is poor. But due to the influence of traditional teaching methods, speaking has not been highlighted among the five basic English skills - listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating and it has been a troublesome problem to both teachers and students. Thus ,it is very important to develop students' practical language competence especially oral communicative competence. How to make it and make the students meet the needs of the society in the new era have become a challenge to college English teaching.Firstly, the author explores and analyses the learning difficulties (psychological and thinking ) which influence the improvement of students' oral English competence . Secondly , through the analysis of difficulties the author suggests that in order to develop students' oral competence four principles should be followed: systematicness, student-centeredness, encouragement and practicality. Thirdly, aiming at these four principles, the author also proposes a series of teaching strategies: bring emotional teaching into play to help students overcome psychological difficulties, arouse students' learning motivation to develop their learning interest, utilize students' role as main body to create student-centered classroom atmosphere, improve students' cultural accomplishment to establish favorable speaking practice surroundings , strengthen language knowledge to build and perfect testing system. Fourthly, to guarantee the implementation of the above strategies, following classroom activities should be organized in teaching: imitation, recitation, retelling, role-playing, discussion, practice through pictures, debate and games. Finally, the author maintains that students' oral English competence will surely be improved when these learning difficulties can be overcome. Only when students can dare to speak, like to speak and be good at speaking will the overall level of college English teaching be improved.