On Two Levels Of FLT--A Probe Into College English Teaching

Foreign language teaching (FLT) has since long ago been one of the hot issues people discuss and argue. It has experienced a long history in China. However, the results of foreign language teaching in our country are not so satisfactory. The present research aims to explore the reasons why this occurs and the ways we can resort to so as to solve the problem.Since Saussure made langue-parole distinction in his linguistic study, linguists and language practitioners have come to realize that foreign language teaching should involve two aspects, namely, langue and parole. However, in the research into the present college English teaching, the present author discovers that in China, many teachers are neither well conducting nor successfully balancing the teaching activities of the two aspects. It is particularly noteworthy that influenced by the traditional linguistic views and teaching methods, many teachers tend to attach great importance to language teaching, but give insufficient attention to speech teaching. Influenced by this kind of teaching tendency, the students cultivated tend to have a good command of linguistic knowledge but possess poor communicative competence. Worse is that as the students lack adequate training and practice of using language, they have difficulty in consolidating the linguistic knowledge they have acquired. In reality, lacking adequate speech teaching activities has become the major obstacle to improve foreign language teaching and learning efficiency.So. in this paper, the present researcher illustrates how to successfully balance the two levels of FLT, that is, language teaching and speech teaching, to improve foreign language teaching and learning efficiency and develop learners' communicative competence.The thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter One, the introduction, begins with the rationale of the paper and outlines the basic structures of the study. Chapter Two gives a brief review of some relevant linguistic theories and researches as well as the communicative approach. Chapter Three makes delimitations of language teaching and speech teaching, illustrates the differences and relationships between them and analyzes their unique status in FLT. Chapter Four deals with research methods: survey and classroom observations. By making a probe into the present college English teaching in his institute, the author obtains lots of information, of which the most valuable is the fact that language teaching and speech teaching areextremely unbalanced and speech teaching has not received adequate and desirable attention. Chapter Five discusses the data collected, stating the major causes and harmful effects of the above phenomena in terms of the essential elements of FLT. In Chapter Six, in virtue of relevant teaching theories, the present author exemplifies the theoretical and realistic bases of the argument that in the process of FLT, teachers ought to focus on language learners and handle successfully language teaching and speech teaching. Then, the researcher offers some suggestions and proposes the adoption of the learner-centered topic-based approach. The last chapter, a conclusion, points out the theoretical and practical significance as well as the limitations of the study.