Research On The Class Design Of The College English Public Speaking Course

The teaching objectives of college English are to cultivate students’ comprehensive English abilities, to enable them to communicate effectively in English in the future study, work and social activities, to enhance their autonomous learning and the cross-cultural awareness, and to meet the needs of social development and international communication. However, college students’ oral English is a weak link, as college oral English courses basically stay on the pattern and practice drills. It only attaches importance to the accuracy of language expression rather than the logical, creative and critical thinking and appropriate expressions. To achieve the fluent and logical oral expression, it becomes essential and urgent to offer the English public speaking(EPS) course. Although the systematic studies about English public speaking class design are relatively less, it is becoming an arresting research topic among many linguists and foreign language teachers.The present research attempts to explore the current situation and class design factors of English public speaking teaching and learning on the guidance of Lucas’ s English speech theory and other theories, such as the psychology theory and communication science theory. It employs both qualitative and quantitative research methods including questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations. The subjects in this research are ten teachers from seven universities and 150 students from two universities. The research is conducted from three aspects: the current situation of the EPS teaching, the analysis of influencing factors of EPS class design, and a tentative model class design of EPS class design, taking the informative speech for instance.The findings of the study can be listed as follows: 1) the current situation of the EPS teaching is not satisfactory. EPS teachers are limited in number and they are lack of the systematic and professional EPS training; the speech videos and online resources play a key role in class, but the literature and reference books on EPS are still far from enough; the teaching objectives are inconsistent among universities; although EPS teaching is the task-based teaching, teaching methods are not flexible and creative; teachers still play a dominant role in class and students are not fully involved in the class activities; the EPS class size is much bigger when compared with the western class, which obviously exerts great impact on the implementation of EPS class design; the evaluation system of EPS class is not well-established. 2) The influencing factors of EPS class design are teaching objectives, teaching principles, teaching approaches, teaching modes, teachers’ and students’ role and class evaluation system, which will demand corresponding changes according to different speech types. 3) Based on the above investigation, the researcher not only develops teaching programs of different speech types, but also makes a specific class design by taking the informative speech for instance, which is expected to give some hints for EPS teaching.