（英语语言文学专业论文）培养交际能力——组织大学英语教学中的语言交际活动.pdf

4 内 容 提 要 在大学英语教学中交际能力已越来越受到关注但是如何培养 学生的交际能力却一直困扰着教师本文试图从语言教学法的视角 探索提高非英语专业大学生英语交际能力的途经和方法论文首先 从教学法的角度出发探讨了交际语言教学的兴起和交际能力的概 念在此基础上指出语言教学和学习的最终目的就是培养语言使用 者的交际能力论文紧接着详细分析了我国大学英语教学的现状及 目前阻碍大学生交际能力发展的诸多因素从而提出了培养交际能 力的有效途径是在课堂上通过组织有效的交际活动进行大学英语教 学 关键词交际语言教学 交际能力 交际活动 大学英语教学 3 abstract communicative competence refers to the ability not only to apply the grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom. communicative language teaching has been paid more and more attention to in college english teaching. but the question of how students should learn in order to develop communicative competence is debated and redebated. from a pedagogical point of view, this paper discusses the historical development of language teaching and the theories of communicative competence and it points out that communicative competence is the desired goal of language teaching. also based on the detailed analysis of the present situation of college english teaching and some obstacles to the development of communicative competence, this paper addresses the issue of organizing communicative activities in college english teaching. key words: communicative language teaching communicative competence communicative activity college english teaching 1 introduction the teaching of english as a foreign language in china has become a nationwide endeavor pursued at all academic levels, from the kindergarten to the university. in the past twenty years there has been an explosion in the development of public school english programs and private english language schools throughout china. however, in recent years, the problem of “more investment and less gain” has arisen. whether the investment in foreign language education is too much is open to question. yet “less gain” reflects peoples general feeling of dissatisfaction with the quality of current foreign language teaching. it is a fact that many university graduates who have studied english for many years still cant use english appropriately. they are structurally competent but communicatively incompetent. they are unable to perform a simple communicative task. the young interpreter may startle his foreign guest every now and then with lumps of memorized language that are completely out of place; the university graduate in a discussion with foreign colleagues may spin out a prefabricated speech, oblivious to what others are talking about. this paper raises several fundamental issues which appear to have been overlooked by many university language teachers, and is limited to the 2 discussion of college english teaching in china. the first chapter traces the historical development of language teaching. the second chapter looks at the present situation. the third chapter focuses on the impact of linguistics on language teaching. the fourth chapter discusses the theory of communicative language teaching with reference to organizing communicative activities. the fifth chapter deals with the importance of organizing communicative activities and the teachers responsibilities and roles in communicative activities. in the sixth chapter, samples of communicative activities are presented. 3 chapter 1 the historical development of language teaching it has been widely accepted that communication is the primary function of language. since the early 1970s, communicative language teaching has been widely discussed. communicative competence is its desired goal. how did the communicative approach come into being? this chapter briefly reviews the history of language teaching methods to provide a background for discussion of contemporary methods. from this historical perspective we are able to see that the concerns that have prompted the modern mainstream methodology innovations were similar to those that have always been at the center of discussion on how to teach foreign languages. 1.1 the grammar-translation method the grammar-translation method (gtm for short) follows much the same way as the teaching of latin. just as the name suggests, gtm puts much emphasis on grammar and translation. the study of classical latin and an analysis of its grammar and rhetoric became the model for foreign language study from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. a rigorous introduction to latin grammar was initially given in grammar schools, such as grammar rules, study of declensions and conjugations, translation, and practice in writing sample sentences, sometimes with the use of parallel bilingual texts and dialogues. so the nineteenth century textbook compilers were mainly determined to codify the foreign language into frozen rules of morphology and syntax to be explained and eventually memorized. oral work was reduced to an absolute minimum, while a handful of written exercises, constructed at random, came 4 as a sort of appendix to the rules, and the sole form of instruction was mechanical translation. hence the name the grammar-translation method to indicate this approach to foreign language teaching. the principle characteristics of the grammar-translation method were as follows: 1. the focus of attention is on reading and writing; 2. emphasis is on meticulous standards of accuracy; 3. classroom language is both the target language and the mother tongue; 4. grammar rules are emphasized and memorized; 5. the sentence is the basic unit of teaching; 6. grammar is taught deductively; 7. it is teacher-centered. the grammar-translation method focuses too much on the teaching of grammatical knowledge about the target language instead of the teaching of real language use. students taught by this method usually spend a lot of time and efforts memorizing the vocabulary and grammar rules. sometimes students may feel frustrated by the dull process of teaching and learning. by using the grammar-translation method, the process of teaching and learning tends to be separated from real life communication. in class, students are required either to listen to the teachers explanation or to do the repetitive work of translation or memorizing. little attempt is made to communicate orally in the target language. as a result, students tend to believe that as long as they can get high scores in the written exams, they will achieve their purpose to learn the target language well. in other words, students are usually less motivated by this teaching method. besides, students are accustomed to forming the habits of making unnatural word-for-word translation from the mother tongue into the target language when they are required to express themselves in the target language 5 in real life situations. apparently these habits prevent them from developing their communicative competence in the target language. the time span of the domination of gtm over european and foreign language teaching was from the 1840s to the 1940s. however, toward the mid-nineteenth century several factors contributed to a questioning and rejection of the grammar-translation method. with the development of the railway system, the countries of the european continent were tied together. the new shipping lines also carried people from one continent to another in increasingly large numbers. such developments as these brought a growing need for practical communication. in the second half of the nineteenth century the industrialization created a new class of language learner, one that had not followed an academic grammar school education and therefore could not be expected to learn foreign languages by traditional methods. increased opportunities for communication created a demand for oral proficiency in foreign languages and created a market for conversation books and phrase books intended for private study. in the mid- and late nineteenth century opposition to gtm gradually developed in several european countries. a new approach was needed to suit their particular circumstances. 1.2 the audiolingual method toward the end of the 1950s the increased attention given to foreign language teaching in the united states led to the emergence of the audiolingual method (alm). the launching of the first russian satellite in 1957 promoted the need for a radical change and rethinking of foreign language teaching methodology. in order to prevent americans from becoming isolated from scientific advances made in other countries, the u.s. government acknowledged the need for a more intensive effort to teach 6 foreign languages. language teaching specialists drew on the earlier experience of the army programs and the aural-oral or structural approach developed by fries and his colleagues, adding insights taken from behaviorist psychology. this combination of structural linguistic theory, contrastive analysis, aural-oral procedures, and behaviorist psychology led to the audiolingual method. the use of drills and pattern practice is a distinctive feature of the audiolingual method. various kinds of drills are used. brooks(1964:156-61) summarizes them as follows: repetition, inflection, replacement, restatement, completion, transposition, expansion, contraction, transformation, integration, rejoinder and restoration. audiolingualism holds that language learning is like other forms of learning. since language is a formal, rule-governed system, it can be formally organized to maximize teaching and learning efficiently. audiolingualism thus stresses the mechanistic aspects of language learning and language use ( richards and rodgers, 2000:60). by using the audiolingual method, structures of the target language are carefully ordered and dialogues are repeated in an attempt to develop correct habits of speaking. sentences in the substitution, mimicry and other drills are often related only syntactically, and they usually have nothing to do with anything actually happening. rules are presented but often not formally explained, and activities such as minimal pairs are commonly used in an effort to overcome the negative transfer (interference) of the mother tongue sounds. listening and speaking skills take precedence over reading and writing skills. however, in most applications, there is very little use of creative language, and a great deal of attention is paid to correct pronunciation. often practice sessions take place in fully equipped language laboratories. 7 this method claims that learning a language means selecting some lexical items from dictionary and combing them with systematic structures recorded on the tape. after mastering a great number of new words and grammar rules, students can only produce some grammatically correct sentences. once in real life situations such as talking to a foreign teacher, they are usually puzzled about what to say. this method faces the danger of producing well-trained parrots. for a number of reasons alm enjoyed many years of popularity, and even to this day, adaptations of alm are found in contemporary methodologies. alm was firmly rooted in respectable theoretical perspectives at the time. materials were carefully prepared, tested out, and disseminated to educational institutions. success could be more overtly experienced by students as they practice their dialogues in off-hours. but the popularity was not to last forever. by the end of the sixties, then came criticism. first, its theoretical basis was found to be weak. behaviorism regarded language learning as similar in principle to any other kind of learning. it was subject to the same laws of stimulus and response, reinforcement and association. then, they denied humans innate creative and cognitive ability in language learning. second, it placed too much emphasis on mechanical training. such drills are not real communication since they transmit no real message. students were being taught to parrot patterns without communication and without interaction. grammar was banned in many school systems. perfect pronunciation was sought often at the expanse of anything else, and lexical meaning was considered unimportant. the teacher followed the tape and filmstrip slavishly and permitted no deviation from the structural progression of the text. they complained about the lack of effectiveness of the techniques in the long run and the boredom they engendered among students. 8 transformational generative grammar shook the foundations of structuralism in linguistics. the whisper of complaints soon became a roar, particularly after noam chomskys two books on transformational generative grammar and his criticism of b. f. skinners work were published. between 1966 and 1972, there was a prolonged and heated debate on alm. 1.3 communicative language method the changes in the british language teaching tradition dating from the late 1960s resulted in the origins of communicative language teaching (clt). until then, situational language teaching represented the major british approach to teaching english as a foreign language. around the 1960s, specialists of linguistics, education, psychology, sociology, etc. observed language and language learning from different perspectives. their findings and future research have led to the establishment of border disciplines (e.g. psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics). the assumptions based on their findings provided us with more comprehensive analysis of language and with deeper insight into the nature of second language learning. all this laid a solid theoretical foundation for the emergence of the communicative approach. in 1957 american linguist noam chomsky pointed out that the structural theories of language were incapable of accounting for the fundamental characteristics of language the creativity and uniqueness of individual sentences in his classic book syntactic structure. chomsky undeniably changed the climate of linguistic thought. his attack of language acquisition as habit formation has changed enormous consequences on our thinking about language teaching. later, british applied linguists began to call into question the theoretical assumptions of traditional language teaching methods. they emphasized 9 another fundamental dimension of language the functional and communicative potential of language. they recognized the need to focus on language teaching on communicative proficiency rather than on mere mastery of structures in foreign language teaching. changes were also brought to syllabus design. british linguist d. a. wilkins (1972) proposed a functional or communicative definition of language that could be considered as a basis for developing communicative syllabuses for language teaching. his book notional syllabuses (1976) had a significant impact on the development of communicative language teaching. by the end of the sixties it was clear that alm had been discredited. as an alternative to alm, communicative language teaching developed from the mid-sixties in response to the criticisms leveled against alm. partially it was a reaction against the mechanical nature and boring activity of drills in alm, but communicative competence was also a counter-concept to chomskys (1957) notion of competence in theoretical linguistics. communicative language teaching is principally a critique of alm in linguistic and psycholinguistic theory. it has pointed out theoretical and practical weakness of the earlier theory and language learning which alm has disregarded or underemphasized, such as creativity and language structure. communicative language teaching allows greater initiative not only to the teacher but also to the student. communicative language teaching insists that language is a vehicle for the expression of functional meaning and emphasizes the semantic and communicative dimension rather than merely the grammatical characteristics of language and leads to a specification and organization of language teaching content by categories of meaning and function rather than by elements of structure and grammar. since the mid-1970s the scope of communicative language teaching has 10 expanded. the wide acceptance of the communicative approach and the relatively varied way in which it is interpreted and applied can be attributed to the fact that practitioners interpret it in different ways. the linguist john firth focused on communicative and contextual factors in language use. he also stressed that language needed to be studied in the broader social-cultural context of its use. still some other scholars viewed it as learner-centered and experience-based teaching. individual learners were seen as possessing unique interests, styles, needs, and goals, which should be reflected in the design of methods of instruction (richards and rodgers, 2000). communicative language teaching is best considered an approach rather than a method. thus although a reasonable degree of theoretical consistency can be discerned at the levels of language and learning theory, at the levels of design and procedure there is much greater room for individual interpretation and variation than most methods permit. consequently, a lot of activities are provided on the theoretical basis of communicative language teaching in order that learners communicative competence can be cultivated in an all-round way. 11 chapter 2 college english teaching 2.1 the college experience according to college english syllabus, the goal of college english teaching is to develop students relatively high level of competence in reading, an intermediate level of competence in listening, speaking, writing and translation so that they can communicate and exchange information in english. college english teaching should