Toward Efficient Speaking Power In English

With China joining WTO and successfully bidding for the 2008 OlympicGames, English has become increasingly important in China. The Englishspeaking ability required by the society for graduates, especially for talentedpeople such as postgraduates, has therefore been highly stressed. Whereas thecommunicative competence of the majority of students is far from satisfaction,and cannot cater for the needs of society. In addition, the spoken Englishteaching in China was greatly influenced by examination-based educationalsystem and had long been neglected; The traditional classroom Englishteaching merely attached importance to students'linguistic ability andtherefore overlooked the cultivation of communicative competence. As a result,it's high time to make a transformation in teaching approaches and focus onoral abilities.Systematic study on the application of communicative language teaching(CLT) in non-English major postgraduate oral English teaching and adoptingCLT to improve students'speaking power has been carried out in sevenchapters.In the first chapter, the significance of improving postgraduates'oralability is discussed and the present situation of spoken English teaching aswell as its drawbacks has been analyzed. Chapter 2 summarizes the relatedlinguistic theories and second language acquisition theory, and reviews someimportant comments and findings in the field of spoken language teaching.Chapter 3,4 and 5 are the main body. Systematic investigations on applyingCLT to improve students'oral capacity have been illustrated in these chapters.Above all, a questionnaire was designed to find out students'needs andexpectations in postgraduate English courses, and after the research design, inchapter 4, the methodologies are carried out in five aspects. Firstly, thedevelopment of listening and speaking ability is interrelated, thus oral Englishteaching might be integrated with training of listening. Secondly, teachersshould manage to introduce genuine context in class, utilizing authenticmaterials to practice pragmatic capacity. Thirdly, appropriateness is one of the...