Improve Students’Four Basic Language Skills

2009-09-01 09:03刁照宏
中学教学参考·语英版 2009年1期

刁照宏

Why do Chinese study English? What is the purpose of high school English teaching? It is clear that its necessary to improve students four fundamental skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and let them master necessary phonetics, large vocabulary and good grammar, but this is not enough. The final purpose is to let students be able to use English freely.

Ⅰ.How to improve listening skill

Firstly, try to let students be in a language environment. We know the largest difference between mother language learning and foreign language learning is the environment. A child can soon learn his mother language well. He has heard a lot before he can say something. Then after he is able to say, he has a good chance of listening to more mother language materials. Before he goes to school, he has already been a good listener and speaker. The more English he listens to, the more English hell speak out!But for a foreign language,students can only hear or use in classes, They can hardly have other chances to hear or use it.

Secondly, try to let students grasp correct phonetic symbol. Phonetic symbol is the base of a language. In the beginning, it is a good method to let students read after a radio. Pay attention to theoral reading skills, including stress, strong form, weak form, intonation, incomplete plosive consonant, affricate consonant, syllables and so on. Training and practicing oral reading cannot be finished in a day. The teacher must give correct information about it. There is no easy way.

Thirdly, try to letstudents keep confident. It is clear that to learn a foreign language is difficult for everyone. If you are able to listen well, youll be more confident in communication. And the more confident you are whenlistening, the more confident you will be when speaking. Keep a relaxed and natural mood when you listen to some materials.

The last but not the least, try to enlarge students knowledge about English. Encourage students to read something in their spare time about geography, history, culture and so on.

Ⅱ.How to improve speaking skill

1.Use modern teaching methods

Communicative Language Teaching is one of the modern methods that can be applied to improve students communicative abilities. In this method, teachers can set different tasks and activities to encourage students to communicate in English. The task of activities includes newspaper report, information exchange, role-playing, discussion and problems'-solving in pairs or groups. It can increase the amount of students talking in a limited period of time and also lower the inhibitions of students who are unwilling to speak in front of the whole class. This method emphasizes the communicative functions of a language, helping students to pay attention to whom they are communicating with and what messages they want to convey.

2. Use some communicative strategies

When students experience a problem in expressing themselves and must either change their meanings or find another way of expression. Teachers can offer them some communicative strategies, such as using approximation, using nonlinguistic resources and using a paraphrase, etc.

3. Create and cultivate a good environment for speaking English

One way is to invite qualified native English speakers to teach students. To develop second?鄄classroom activities is another useful way which is beyond classroom teaching and provides more options for students to choose from, such as English corners, radio stations for English programs and so on.

Ⅲ. How to improve reading skill

1. Encourage students to read

Reading ability can only be improved through abundant reading practice.

2. Encourage students to respond to the content of a reading text rather than just to the language

The meaning and the message of a text are much more important than the language structures. Teachers should help students understand that the main task to read is to catch the main idea. They have to have their own purposes to read and reading must make sense. They should be encouraged either to reread or to continue reading to gain its meaning. Students should be encouraged to ask themselves questions repeatedly, “Does this make sense to me?”

3. Encourage students to guess or predict

Readers guesses or predictions are based on the cumulative information and syntactic structure they have been learning as been read. Therefore, their guesses are often appropriate to the materials. Students have to realize that risk taking in reading is appropriate; that using context to guess the meaning of some words is a proficient reading strategy and that they have the language sense to make appropriate guesses which can fit both the grammatical and semantic sense of what they are reading.

4.Match the task to the topic

Once a decision has been taken about what kind of reading text students are going to read, teachers need to choose good reading tasks—the right kind of questions and helpful puzzles, etc. Asking boring and inappropriate questions can undermine the most interesting text, while the most commonplace passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and challenging tasks. The teacher may ask, “What is the significance of the characters age?” Such questions require inferences based on details from the reading text.

Ⅳ. How to improve writing skill

1. Selectivity

Rather than engage in intensive error-correction when responding to the students writing, teachers are encouraged to adopt a more moderate approach to errors. If the teacher over-corrects students mistakes, students would be likely to focus on errors instead of ideas. Students are more likely to grow as writers when teachers primary purpose in reading student papers is to focus on content. However, if attention to content and correctness are combined when grading papers, it is more helpful to select one or two kinds of errors students are making than to point out every error in the paper. The teacher can identify a selected error, show an example or two on students papers, and either explain the correct form or direct the student to a handbook for further explanation. It is always worth writing a comment at the end of a piece of written work—anything from “Well done” to “This is a good story, but you must look again at your use of past tenses—see xx grammar book, page xx.”