On The Cultivation Of Police Students' Oral Communicative Competence

Nowadays, the specific English training for police officers is becoming more and more important. Many reference books and booklets for police English have been published recently. Some of them are introduced into the classroom. English teaching for the police students has never been emphasized and enhanced like this. Many problems in police English teaching and learning have appeared. What can we teach to help the police students serve their future job? What is an efficient and effective way in their English teaching? What linguistic skill is the most important one for police students? What and how can we use the reference of the general English teaching approaches? What does communicative competence mean for police students? That is a long way for a PET teacher to go.College English teachers and researchers have a common view on the importance of oral communicative competence. But when it comes to PET, some details ought to be changed because though PET, as a sub-branch of English for specific purposes (ESP), is not a particular kind of language teaching, it has many features of its own. Police English is an occupational language and each occupational language has its specific characteristics differing from the general language. If one only focuses on the formal side of language, he or she may pay less attention to the characteristics which are exclusively confined to a real occupational field.This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of the cultivation of police students' oral communicative competence. Former study of communicative competence is presented in this thesis and a brief introduction of ESP is also given because if we want to succeed in police English teaching, we must have a thorough understanding of all the ESP's traits. The details involve the definition of ESP, the types of ESP, the development of ESP and some key points to ESP course design. These reviews give a large amount of theoretical nutriment to the proper police English teaching theories and approaches.In the second chapter, the author firstly gives a brief introduction on Police English Teaching (PET) and goes on finding where the PET is and getting the relatively clearrelationship among PET, ESP and ELT. Some specific features of PET are also presented in this part, including the relationship between language and occupation, basic features of police oral English implementation, required abilities for a police officer in English, specific learning process and learners and also the current negative influences on police oral English teaching and learning. Only by this, can the English lessons for the police students be carried out in an appropriate and efficient way.The third chapter is the core of this thesis. Based on the Gatehouse's identification of three abilities that are necessary for successful professional activities and surveys of many police college graduates and units, the author of this thesis also presents three abilities necessary for successful communication in a police professional target setting. That constitutes the main target of the whole PET process. In order to gather the appropriate teaching materials, a "Needs Analysis" for the police students is carried out. The needs analysis contains two aspects: one target needs (what police officers do with English), another learning needs (how police officers learn to do what they do with English). In order to answer the two fundamental questions, many questionnaires and interviews are conducted. The Likert Scale technique is mainly used in the questionnaires. The semantic differential pattern and open-ended questions are also used in the questionnaires. The participants include police students, police officers, instructors and experts.The whole questionnaires and the interviews bring the author many useful statistics and also reveal a positive response for the whole PET. According to the findings, the author discusses and gives some recommendations to the PET. The details are mentioned in the fourth chapter.In the fifth chapter, a sample oral lesson is presented. The whole lesson plan is based on learner-centered and task-based theories. Some key points of the course designing are mentioned in this part. The lesson is just a sample, which indicates the ways in which PET teachers cultivate the police students' professional oral communicative competence. That is also the aim of the whole thesis.