http://ucemail.yculblog.com/post.15092.html
Preface
Since 1970s, China has developed and strengthened her communication of English teaching with Britain, America, Canada, Australia as well as New Zealand through researches and the brought-in of the teaching materials and teaching methodologies. What is more important, we deplore deeper into foreign educating theories and practice, and it does more contribution to the development of the project of English teaching in China.
In 1970s, we brought in the situational textbooks and Alexander‘s New Concept of English and applied audiovisual approach in English teaching, on which we adopted its methodology and made some amendments.
By the end of that decade, communicative approach had taken the dominant place. After Follow Me was broadcasted, communicative approach gained more attention and led our emphasis on English teaching from pure language skills and the ABC of English to the formation of communicative skills.
Up to now, English teaching has so many variations in China, for different universities adopt different teaching methodologies. As Li Lanqing pointed out, English teaching is more waste-of-time than harvest in teaching proficiency, which should be cared of. For example, nine out of ten of sophomores have spent twelve years learning English. However, they lack fluency and comprehensive skills in reading original English publications. What is worse, they encounter difficulties listening to as well as speaking out the foreign language. It is out of the question for them to contact native speakers. The above phenomena reflect the unsatisfactory implementation of the English teaching methodologies adopted from abroad.
In this research paper, I try to analyze from a university student‘s point of view the causes of the phenomenon and work out some possible solutions to those problems. The research paper covers threes aspects: the basis, the content and the methodologies in second language teaching and learning, and extends the topics into language accuracy and fluency, then draws a conclusion on how to implement the English teaching approaches to cater for the needs of both teachers and students. Then, let us start from the basis of second language teaching and learning to pierce into current situation in the field of university English teaching and learning.
1. Basis of Second language Learning and Teaching—Learning Process 1.1 Language
Before we start the topic, it is fairly necessary to make one thing clear, that is the distinction between second language learning and second language acquisition. As most of the researchers put it, second language learning refers to one‘s learning a second or third language other than one‘s native language in native environment while second language acquisition talks about learning the target language in a naturalistic environment e.g. a Chinese learning English in China. Therefore, for most
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(ninety percent or more) of the university students, their activities on learning English or other foreign languages are labeled second language learning.
From this perspective, we can make a comparison between Universal Grammar (UG) and Second Language Learning (L2 Learning). People use UG to explain how the first language (native language) is acquired. According to Norm Chomsky, UG is a biological device inside the human brain. It is an endowment that all children are born with and the initial state from which children proceed to acquire their first language. Though sharing some similarities with UG, L2 Learning differs from L1 Acquisition in some important ways:
L2 Learning generally lacks success, reaches a stage where progress ceases (a phenomenon called Fossilization), and involves first language transfer, more matured cognitive abilities and different motivations for learning a second language (Bley-Vroman: 19).
As that is the case, when Chinese university students learn English, they do not have access to UG and will use longer time to master the fundamental knowledge of English, which impinges a tougher difficulty on them to train their logical thinking in a foreign language.
That is also the reason why those students need a period of time to think about some ideas in Chinese and then translate them into English; afterwards, they output it, spending more time on checking their use of English.
For L2 learning, most of the teachers may complain about the students‘ poor abilities of finding out rules of the second language by themselves. In linguistics we can al that the students connecticism abilities are low- which is really a problem at present for the students cannot self-study well.
The above are the problems caused by language. 1.2 Learner
1.2.1 Learner‘s Motivation and Interest
Up to now, we have talked about one objective point- language. In fact, learners, or we say, university students here play the major role in their English learning process. Since students can be divided into active and passive two groups, they also have various personalities and characteristics. Then, we should talk about their motivations and interests first.
Students‘ motivations and interests are their desires to let them pay attention to English and study hard. If they show little or no interest in English, their motivations are not aroused correctly. Penny Ur develops her ideas about this into nine points (Ur 1996: 281):
Clear goals; varied topics and tasks; visuals; tension and challenge: games; entertainment; play-acting; information gap; personalization; open-ended cues.
As the above, on learning English, students should bear clear goals in mind. They should also have interesting topics that are selected carefully as well as eye-catching visuals relevant to the task. More useful, they need to entertain themselves in English learning via game-like activities, which adds their motivation. While in campus life and classes, they are unlikely to get access to those well-designed and carefully selected English learning activities and therefore lose their interests to some extent. As a result, the goals are not as clear as it should be. Maybe this time, getting a grade in tests is regarded as the most beneficial aim. Without motivation, students will never have interests in English and learn it by heart.
1.2.2 Learner‘s Age Group- Adult Learners
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By the way, university students are over eighteen years old and can be called adults. According to Critical Period Hypothesis, adults feel that they are not learning properly in play-like situations and prefer a conventional formal style of learning, which is the main teaching methodology in university. But in essence, if they can join in the seemingly childish activities whole-heartedly, they will learn better than children, who learn English through role-play and simulation, which are in conflict with their adolescent anxieties. Age is by no means crucial to L2 learning itself. Spolsky(19) describes three for L2 learning related to age:
1. Formal classroom learning requires skills of abstraction and analysis. That is to say, if the teaching method entails sophisticated understanding and reasoning by the student, as for instance a traditional grammar-translation method, then it is better for the student to be older.
2. The child is more open to L2 learning in informal situations. Hence children are easier to teach through an informal approach.
3. The natural L2 acquisition may favor children. The teaching of adults requires the creation of language situations in the classroom that in some ways compensate for this lack. An important characteristic of language spoken to small children is that it is concerned with the here and now rather than with the absent objects or the abstract topics that are talked about in adult conversation-adults do not even talk about the weather much to a two-year-old child! That is to say, ordinary speech spoken by adults is too sophisticated for L2 learning. Restricting the language spoken to the beginning L2 learner to make it reflect the here-and-now could be of benefit. This is reminiscent of the audiovisual and situational teaching methods, which stress the provision of concrete visual information through physical objects or pictures in the early stages of L2 learning. But as always with published materials they have to aim at an average student.
Many teenagers may scorn soap operas; many adults have no interest in discussing holidays yet again. For this adult-learner group, the current difficulty is how to provide them with useful techniques and materials.
Conventionally, linguists break language down into three main components: the phonology, the lexis and the structure. We define this in university English teaching conveniently as pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. A language course may be based on the previous three items or on the more communicative categories of topic, situation and function. Probably, however, the most effective teaching and learning result from a combination of them all. Topics and situations provide a context for the teaching of new words, and the structures are learned in order to express notions or functions. In the following topic, we will start to talk about the content to teaching with an aim relevant to students‘ weakness.
2. Content of Second Language Teaching 2.1 Pronunciation
Generally speaking, pronunciation includes phonology, or the sounds of the language, stress and rhythm, and intonation three aspects. And the most obvious and clearly defined is the sound of language. But a learner may pronounce perfectly and still sound foreign because of unacceptable stress and intonation. In Chinese, intonation often makes a difference to meaning.
English speech rhythm is characterized by tone-units. The sentence: ―Jim, come here please.‖ For example, would divide into two sound units ―Jim‖ and ―come here please.‖ with the two main stresses on the first syllable of ―Jim‖, and the word ―here‖.
The rhythm of English is mainly a function of its stress patterns; these may also affect such aspects as speed of delivery, volume and the use of pause.
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Intonation is an important aspect of the pronunciation of English, often making a difference to meaning or implication. Stress, for example, is most commonly indicated not by increased volume but by a slight rise in intonation (Brazil, Coulthard and Johns, 1980). A native speaker usually has little difficulty is hearing intonation changes in his or her own languages; others, however, may not find it easily. Besides hearing, non-native speakers also make pronunciation errors. That‘s because: a) a particular sound may not exist in the mother tongue, so that the learner is not used to forming it and therefore is more likely to find the nearest equivalent the learner knows to substitute it. (The substitution of /d/ and /z/ for the English pronunciation of th as in the word that) b) a sound does exist in the mother tongue, but not as a separate phoneme: that is to say, the learner does not perceive it as a distinct sound that makes a difference to meaning. On the whole, this is more difficult. A totally new sound is often easily perceived as alien, and once you hear a sound you are well on the way to being able to pronounce it, and the problem of perception needs to be overcome before any progress can be made. c) Learners have the actual sounds right, but have not learnt the stress patterns of the word group of words, or they are using an intonation from their mother tongue that is inappropriate to the target language. The result is a foreign-sounding accent, and possibly misunderstanding (like Americans pronounce nou rou –beef in Chinese)
For teachers, the first priority is to check that the learner can hear and identify the sound they teach. It is the same with intonation, rhythm and stress. For sound formation it may help to use a sketch of the mouth and to describe the pronunciation of a sound in terms of lips, tongue, teeth, etc. But for other aspects of pronunciation a brief explanation is enough, followed by presentation and imitation as well as practice. 2.2 Vocabulary
Vocabulary is defined as the words we teach in the foreign language. It includes not only items, but also words that express a single idea and multi-word idioms. In all, six aspects of vocabulary need to be thought: form (pronunciation and spelling); grammar; collocation; two aspects of meaning (a. denotation, connotation, appropriateness; b. meaning relationships) and word formation. We can use various ways to present new words: concise definition, detailed description, examples, illustration, demonstration, context, synonyms, antonyms, translation and the associated ideas, or collocations.
But among students, their abilities of remembering vocabulary are different, even the same student performs differently on various occasions. Let us have a look at the word-learning experiment proposed by Penny Ur (1996:65) A B
WHODOTASHLARSEXOCTFORAWEIONCANOWNDIGOBIHUTTHE ARMLEGPEGPIGTONFOXDOGCATMANBOYSONMUMDADBADSAD WORD-LEARNING EXPERIMENT© Cambridge University Press 1996 Table 2.2 Word-list for word-learning experiment
As observed and practiced, List B produces nearly perfect scores while List A noticeably less when students are divided into two groups to remember each of the lists for a while and write the words they remember as many as possible. This is because; List B is labeled fairly low level of difficulty while List A belongs to the very mixed level. And the fact that List B is grouped according to meaning-or sound-association, while List A is not. The results indicates not only that we learn words better when we can easily assign meaning to them, but also that it is much easier to learn words in groups, where one can be in harmony with another.
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From the conclusion above, we may teach vocabulary as follows:
1. Students can have better results if the words we teach have clear, easily understandable meanings. 2. The good result can also be obtained if the words they remember can be associated with each other. Some of them are already learned before.
3. Do not teach vocabulary with compact intervals. It is better separate it and scatter it into spaced sessions.
In other words, if we really want to teach vocabulary well, the perfect match is to teach vocabulary briefly at the beginning of a lesson and review that later(in one session) and again in the next than if the same total amount of time is used for learning the words all at once. This requires careful lesson planning, but deserves the effort. 2.3 Grammar
On talking about grammar, all of English teachers have encountered the occasions that they correct students‘ grammar mistakes. Usually, they perceive a mistake intuitively, say: something sounds or looks wrong. It may actually interfere with successful communication, or simply produce a slight feeling of discomfort in the reader or hearer. But, more often than not, what does not accord with some grammar book prescriptions is quite acceptable to competent or native speakers of the language.
In general, if we explain certain grammar points properly and provide the students with plenty of varied practice in using them, we may hope that university students will make fewer mistakes. But some mistakes or errors still appear inevitably.
Mistakes may be seen as integral and natural component of learning, it is also a symptom of the students‘ progress through this media towards a closer and closer approximation to the target language-English. Some may think that it is not necessary to correct at all: as the students advance mistakes will disappear on their own. Even if you think that grammar mistakes need to be corrected, it is important to relate to them as a means to advance teaching and learning instead of a sign of inadequacy.
Therefore, on grammar practice activities, teachers should help students make a leap from current form-focused accuracy work to fluent, but acceptable production via providing a variety of activities that familiarize them with the structures in context, giving practice both in structure (or organization) and communicative meaning.
With this guideline, when designing practice activities, we may follow some types. For example, after students have been introduced to a language structure, we can provide students with excerpts or extracts from newspaper articles or magazine stories to ask students to find and underline all the examples of the grammar point that they can find. Or, we can also design controlled or meaningful drills to get responses from the students. Example:
Choose someone you are quite familiar with, organize sentences as follows: Jack drinks tea but he doesn‘t drink coffee. a) Like: ice cream/ cakes b) Speak: English/ Chinese
c) Enjoy: playing tennis/ playing golf
Other useful types include: structure-based free sentence composition (ask students to tell others what everyone is doing according to the picture offered), discourse composition (here it means given-topic writing or group discussion, or we can find anyone when talking freely.)
2.4 Mutual directions in teaching language chunks: from text to task and from task to text
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As the base of this, we should talk about learning by heart first.
As is against by teachers and educationalists, learning by heart is related to mindless rote learning of previous generations of schoolchildren. It is also associated with discouragement of one‘ one‘s creative or original thinking and stress on the memorization of data such as dates in history and passages from literature. At that time, methodologists were against the unthinking habit-forming learning methodology.
However, more recently, people both within language teaching and in other areas of education begin t realize that learning by heart has value, and that it is quite accordant with creativity. Just as an automatic knowledge of the multiplication tables enables the young mathematician to progress faster into interesting problem solving, so memorized chunks of language or formulaic utterances associated with particular communicative contexts furnish the learner with a rich and reliable vocabulary of ready-made expressions which contribute significantly to his or her overall mastery of the language (Widdowson 19).
Thus if we present our learners with samples of functions incorporated into situational dialogues, it makes sense to ask them to learn some of these by heart, provided that we consistently maintain their awareness of the meaning and purpose of what they are saying.
Learning texts by heart and then delivering them according to different interpretations is one way of engaging with samples of written or spoken language functions or situations. Another possibility is to take the basic text and elaborate on it(Ur 1996). The class may be invited to vary and extend them, leading to further exploration of the language being learned. They might create a new text on a similar topic; or suggest other ways the characters could have expressed the same notions or functions, or the meeting might have developed, and how the characters might have expressed themselves; besides, they may represent the original text in a different way.
As a reversed direction, teaching topics, situations, notions and functions through tasks and learner initiated language rather than through ready-made texts is another possible strategy. Prabhu (1987) and Willis (1990) have described this methodology. In such a methodology, the teacher has a syllabus of topics, but may or may not have ready-made texts or lists of actual language samples that are to be taught. The main initiatives come from students. In a person-description course, the teacher lets them students‘ work in pairs to describe several pictures of persons. If they need new bots of language, they may ask others or the teacher, in the end, the teacher summarizes the new knowledge and elaborates on them. The advantage of doing this is that the minds of the teacher and students are from the outset firmly focused on the central language topic, whereas the use o a text as starting point can lead to neglect of meaning and purpose in favor of analysis of grammar and vocabulary item. While for some ones who prefer the appointed topic teaching methodology, this may not be advantageous.
Anyway, the teaching of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar will tend to be accuracy-oriented. In these, we are mainly interested in getting students pronounce correctly, use words appropriately and organize sentences properly. In teaching English four skills- listening, speaking, reading and writing-however, the emphasis will shift from accuracy in the former to fluency in the latter.
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3. Methodologies in Second Language Teaching 3.1 Teaching Listening
On teaching listening, the aim is to help students familiar with real-life listening. However, they always face problems in finding the right answers in tests, or when they use their listening abilities in real life communication, for most of them, they have trouble with sounds i.e. they can only perceive standard accent in a given situation. But real-life communication offers more inaccurate accent. The second problem is that they try to understand every word in the listening material to master the content of conversations or monologues, learning to find the key words is always the disaster. Even if in English classes, they ask teachers to speak slowly, in order to listen clearly and capture the points, which takes them away from natural native speech. Then, when they do listening exercises, they wish or need to hear things more than once and find it difficult to keep up. The result of the above phenomena is clear: they get tired easily and lose motivations and interests to improve themselves. On order to solve their problems, when designing listening activities, it is necessary to make four types of activities to let students improve gradually.
The first type includes stories, songs, and films, theatre, video entertainments. In these activities, students do not need to do anything in response to the listening, however, their facial expressions and body language can tell if they are following or not. If the story (joke, anecdotes, retelling of a famous story) is well selected, students are likely to be motivated to attend and understand in order to enjoy it; singing songs or listening to tape recordings may simply lead them to relaxation, requiring certain responses from the students can be more task-oriented; as with stories, if the content is really entertaining, learners will be motivated to make an effort to understand without and further task. The next one is short responses. We can train students with listening passages with several statements. Then we do true or false questions. We can also do cloze, a passage with several gaps, which is the abstract of the listening material. The task is to ask students to take notes and fill in banks. This kind of exercises is comprehensive. It makes the students use their listening abilities and their use of language, which is regarded as a comparatively advanced means of training students. The third one is large responses. It is a deeper level that appears in the form of paraphrasing and translating, or summarizing and long gap-filling tasks.
The last one is extended responses. Here, the listening is only a jump-off point for extended reading, writing or speaking. In other words, these are multi-skill activities. For example, a problem is described orally, and then listeners discuss and write down possible solutions. An alternative is to take an extract from a dialogue or monologue, which has some key words. Listeners guess from the words the topic of the dialogue or monologue and reflect that in written or oral forms.
Ever so often, listening comes into fashion in the 1960s. It became fashionable again in the 1980s, when Krashen‘s ideas about comprehensible input gained prominence. In fact, it is the Cinderella skill in second language learning. Without competent listening abilities, one cannot get enrolled in English learning smoothly. 3.2 Speaking
Students are most worried about their speaking. They are worried about making mistakes, fearful of criticism or losing face, or simply shy of the attention that their speech attracts. Even if they are not inhibited, they often complain that they cannot think of anything to say. They have no motive to say other than the feeling that they should be speaking. At English corners, we can also find that in groups, each student has little chance to speak. They listen to the dominant speaker and
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keep on nodding their heads to show that they understand the speech, even if they get the chance, more often than not, their mother tongue controls the layout of speech. In a word, it is really hard for learners to talk a lot, to gain high motivation to express themselves in relevant utterances. This seems Utopian.
However, through teachers‘ certain effort, it is promising to help to solve some of the problems. The top one is to use group work. This will lower the inhibitions of learners who are unwilling to speak in public and also increase the amount of learner talk going on in a limited period of time. Unavoidably, the teacher cannot monitor all learner speeches, and learners may randomly slip into their native language. Nevertheless, even taking into consideration those occasional mistakes and mother-tongue use, the amount of time remaining for positive, useful oral practice is still likely to be far more than in the full-class set-up.
Next way should be lowering the language in discussion. Only if the activities are easy-language-based, can the language be easily recalled and produced by the participants, so that they can speak fluently with the least hesitation. It is recommended that teachers teach pr review essential vocabulary before the activity starts.
The third one is that, we should make careful choice of topic and task to stimulate interest, and give some instruction or training on discussion skills. In task-centered activity, there is more talk, more even participation, more motivation and enjoyment. Participants know where they are going; there are some purposes in speaking. It is a challenge as well, participants watch time running out and they need to get a result. While for topic-oriented discussion, participants can go into things more deeply without the pressure of having to reach a decision. So in a balanced program, occasional topic centered discussions and task-centered activities must be concluded.
The last but not the least, we should keep students speaking the target language-English. Although there are no penalties, it is beneficial to make students aware that they are using English as the official language to communicate with others and express their ideas. In the meantime, teachers are suggested to be there, modeling the language use and make the discussion go on.
Besides, it is suggested that interaction talk, activities that help students to practice speaking in long turns (telling stories, telling jokes, morning report) and visual situations, feelings, relationships based on role-play techniques are traditional but Chinese culture related useful strategies to improve students‘ English abilities.
Moreover, although we do not have such big sales and satisfactory conditions, oral tests worth investment. Just like final exams are set to check students‘ acquisition of the subject, oral tests can make students aware their actual position of using oratorical skills and help them improve. The point is that we should work out ways to ensure appropriate training for large number of testers. Up to now, what we really hav done is only requiring testers to grade according to very explicit criteria in the form of tables or diagrams. For example: Accuracy Mark1 Fluency Mark2
Little or no language produced 1 Little or no communication 1
Poor vocabulary, mistakes in basic grammar, may have very strong foreign accent 2 Very hesitant and brief utterances, sometimes difficult to understand 2
Adequate but not rich vocabulary, makes obvious grammar mistakes, slight foreign accent 3 Gets ideas across, but hesitantly and briefly 3
Good range of vocabulary, occasional grammar slips, slight foreign accent 4 Effective communication in short turns 4
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Wide vocabulary appropriately used, virtually no grammar mistakes, native-like or slight foreign accent 5 Easy and effective communication, uses long turns 5 TOTAL SCORE OUT OF 10: _______________
Table 3.1 Scale of Oral Testing Criterion in Israeli Exam (Ur 1996: 135) 3.3 Reading
As is often said, people read purposes. In English learning process (i.e. exams and self-study), students read a lot to find out certain information. Rivers and Temperly (1978: 187) suggest that there are seven main purposes for reading:
1. To obtain information for some purposes or because we are curious about some topics;
2. To obtain instructions on how to perform some task for our work or daily life (e.g. knowing how an appliance works);
3. To act in a play, play a game, do a puzzle;
4. To keep in touch with friends by correspondence or to understand business letters; 5. To know when or where something will take place or what is available;
6. To know what is happening or has happened (as reported in newspapers, magazines, reports); 7. For enjoyment or excitement.
Davis (1995) reviews studies by Lunzer and Gardner (1979) and Harri-Augstain and Thomas (1984) that set out the different types of reading that exist:
1. The fist of these is receptive reading, which is the rapid, automatic reading that we do when we read narratives;
2. Reflective reading, in which we pause often and reflect on what we have read;
3. Skim reading, in which we read rapidly to establish in a general way what a text is about; 4. Scanning, or searching for specific information.
Davis concludes, however, that in actual reading performance
… It is difficult to draw clear boundaries between the types of reading termed skimming and scanning; in real life, scanning inevitably involves some skimming (and scanning) of large sections of text, and skimming, reciprocally, must embrace some scanning. Furthermore, skimming and scanning both involve fairly rapid superficial reading and both are aimed at searching, rather than deep processing of text or reflection upon the content of the fact. Davies 1995: 137
Then, for the teaching of reading, some recommendations are indispensable:
1. Through massive reading and giving students time to read their own simplified readers. Make sure they have sufficient and successful reading experience.
2. Make sure that most of the vocabulary in reading texts is familiar to students, and that words that are unknown can be easily guessed or safely ignored.
3. Give interesting tasks before asking students to read, so that they have a clear purpose and motivating challenge. Or use texts that are interesting enough to provide their own motivation.
4. Make sure that tasks encourage selective, intelligent reading for the main meaning, and do not just test understanding of trivial details.
5. Allow or even encourage students to manage without understanding every word: by the use of scanning tasks, for example, that requires them to focused on limited items of information.
6. Provide as wide a variety of texts and tasks as possible, to give learners practice in different kinds of reading.
Just from the reading materials in national English Tests, we can find out easily
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that the focus of the test has moved to the students‘ life-related topics. Under this circumstance, students should be introduced to daily events and mass media as weld as to ay more attention to the surroundings. 3.4 Writing
In a broad sense, when learners note down new vocabulary, copy out grammar
rules, write out answers to reading or listening comprehension questions, do written tests, writing is used to be a means of getting the students to participate and practice a particular language point, or to be a convenient method of testing it. Through this, teachers can get the information on how well something has been learned in a form that the teacher can then check afterwards. N a word, writing is regarded as a means.
But writing can also be viewed as an end. There are activities take as their main objective the writing itself. At the macro level, they practice specific written forms at the level of word or sentence; at the micro level, the emphasis is on content and organization. Examples are: narrating a story, writing a letter, and so on.
A third point of view of writing is that it is both a means and an end. For example, a written response to the reading of a controversial newspaper article (combines writing with reading) and the writing of anecdotes to illustrate the meaning of idioms (combines writing with vocabulary practice) are examples of using writing to train students‘ comprehensive abilities.
No matter what the nature of writing is, its purpose is the expression of ideas and the conveying of a message to the reader. One of our problems in teaching writing is to maintain a fair balance between content and form when defining requirements and assessing. But this balance, to some extent, depends on real teaching situation and opinion.
Therefore, on designing tasks that stimulate writing, we can have various ways, say, forms for students to select. Book report, book review, instruction sheet, narrative, personal story, description of a view or someone, replying a letter, job application, proposition of change, news report, describing process, film music imagination are all good forms to use.
Of course, giving feedback is necessary. Feedbacks can give students information of what level they are at and which part of their knowledge should be enriched or broadened. For teachers, they should correct language mistakes, and give feedback on both content and organization. Furthermore, rewriting is important, it can make one‘s writing more fluent and purpose-oriented. But for detailed strategies, we can adopt three ways: teachers comment on writing first, then students rewrite; students rewrite before handing the writing in; students read each other‘s works and try to correct others‘ mistakes and make mutual progress. In fact, third way should be proposed, for students have the chance to learn from each other, no matter it is success or failures.
When students are improving themselves, their English abilities are improved together instead of separately. So when teachers organize classes that aims at improving university students English abilities, both accuracy and fluency should be taken into consideration at the same time.
4. Conclusion
Nowadays, we choose the combination of traditional teaching methodology, which aims at managing language, master language abilities, and communicative approach, which, on the other hand, put the effort on communicative approach. We can divide this into five points:
1. On dealing with the relationship between language and parole, we should take communicative abilities as the center, teaching the basic knowledge as an assistant;
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2. On speaking and writing, we should not neglect listening and speaking-the first rank of the skills-as well as reading and writing. The major concern is the formation and improvement of reading ability that is based on four skills;
3. For the harmony between language and mother tongue, it is important devices. We try to use English as the official language in class, Chinese is allowed on the occasion that English cannot solve the problems in class;
4. In general, the keywords are discourse analysis and comprehensive managerial work; in detail, the analysis of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar follows up;
5. In the meantime, is unavoidable to learn from the validity-proved experience.
For example, Grammar-translation method has the nature of managing and implement the learned knowledge, and the emphasis is on the accuracy of language and grammar education, translation as well as the use of mother tongue, because proficiency in managing and using the learned language is compulsory to improve one‘s communicative abilities. In class, we just use mother tongue to explain those abstract concepts, idioms and collocations in time, the students can capture the point very clearly. While for Audiovisual and Situational methods, oral English is the top priority. Through repetition of sentence drills students learn language, and they arrive at the satisfactory result fast. Anyway, we should bear in mind the real situation under which students learn language and make language education more flexible.
In all, the topic itself has a broad coverage and may ignore some of the current phenomena or problems. It is beneficial to combine theories with practice in class. But in fact, for some reasons, we cannot get sufficient datum to advance the research. It is time that can make the research more flexible and close to the up-to-date university English teaching. To conclude, keeping general guidance-to learn from experience and accept the new-then dip research into actual teaching, we can certainly make education more successful and reach our goal of improving students English language abilities. References
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