李晨英语教学网

文：李晨

在本站的留言板上，Julie Shen提出了她的困惑：

…I have an English friend. The two of us talk for an hour everyday from Monday to Firday via MSN. However I don’t see any noticeable improvement in my spoken English. Why?…

概括地讲，你和你的语伴（可能是你的同学、老师或者外国朋友）每天花了很长时间练习口语，但是收效甚微，到底是为什么呢？

Julie Shen的这个问题并不是个特例，许多英语自学者都面临着她遇到的问题。都说“Practice makes perfect!”为什么我花了力气，还是什么长进都没有呢？难道“Practice makes perfect!”是骗人的？！

这句谚语的确是真理，但是用到练习英语口语上来，李晨想要告诉您的是，Practice does not always make perfect!

我还要提醒您，现在暑假到了，诸多英语培训机构都瞄准了这个“黄金”时段准备开办各式各样的口语培训班。我从来不反对大家报名参加英语短期培训，我自己也曾撰写过短期英语语音培训教材并任职于某英语培训机构。但是，我的亲身经历告诉我，要想取得实实在在的进步，一味地寄希望于英语培训师或者外教是绝对行不通的；必须做一个聪明的学习者，在做好充分的准备之后再报班学习。

一、简单吗？不简单！

我在教学过程中常常听到学生嫌教材内容简单了。真是这样吗？难道教材编写者刻意低估学习者的能力？

当然不是！为了阐明我的观点，先请您听一段简单的英语对话（取材于人教版初中英语课本）。

收听录音：

Li Lei: Sam, what are you going to do tomorrow?
Sam: Nothing much. Why?
Li Lei: We’re going to watch a football game. Would you like to come too?
Sam: I’d love to! What kind of football, American or soccer?
Li Lei: Soccer. But we don’t call it soccer in China. We call it football.

您是否能从这段对话中总结出下列内容？–

1. Topic: sports (football)
2. Grammar: the usage of “to be going to do something”
3. Vocabulary: football game, American football, soccer
4. Pronunciation: the linkage of a consonant with a vowel sound ( “what are”, “would you”)
5. Function: making an invitation (Would you like to come?) and accepting an invitation (I’d love to)
6. Conversation technique: making a pre-invitation before the real invitation (What are you going to do tomorrow? )
7. Non-verbal Communication: facial expressions, hand movements, etc. (If the teacher does the demonstration in addition to having the students listen to the recording.)
8. Cultural information: how the word “football” is understood by Chinese learners of English and by Americans.

这些分析是从英语教师的角度对这段对话的解构，您也许会讶异于这么短的对话中所包含的知识点如此丰富，但毋庸置疑的是，如果您不能从中学到这些知识，这一段课文的学习就没有到位。

专家教授对与英语初学者的建议都是从阅读简易读物、观赏卡通电影这些简单的语言活动开始做起，一方面，语言越简单，使用的句子结构就越明显，便于记忆和模仿；另一方面，这些看似简单的语言活动如果深究起来，是大有学问可挖的！上面的分析就是例子。

二、口语练习，都练习了些什么？

对于口语练习来说，除了要坚持不懈、抓住一切机会开口练习，还要注重在每一次练习的过程中做好自我总结，有意识地去练习相关语言技巧。下表中列出了您在口语中需要考虑到的12项因素：

注：上表中列举出的12项因素在您的口语练习中应尽量全部考虑到位。

虽然口语练习的主题和形式五花八门，但是基本都是在训练下表中列举出的语言交际功能：

三、录音机是你的必要装备

当然，在具体操作时，您不可能也没有必要把上面两张表格随身携带，不断地去对照实施。您只能在练习之后去回想和反思这次练习的成果。这也就凸显了录音的重要性！

以Julie Shen通过MSN与外国朋友聊天为例，如果她能够把每一次长达一小时的对话录音保存下来，回放给自己或者她的老师听，找出自己常犯的错误，记录下外国朋友说过但是没能一下子反应过来的一些词汇和表达，做好书面总结，假以时日，必然能取得明显的进步！

没有听过自己录音的朋友第一次听到自己的声音时会情不自禁地“Wow！这是我的声音吗？怎么这么怪”？！的的确确，我们“认为”自己声音的效果往往与我们的听众听到的效果相去甚远。对于英语口语练习来说，一个简便易行的检验自己发音是否到位的方法就是录下自己的声音，然后自己去听。要知道，我们被VOA、BBC、好莱坞电影“宠坏”的耳朵是非常挑剔的，很快就能辨别出自己的录音中哪些发音是不到位的。——你自己已经是个很好的评委了，当你自己对自己满意时，再请老师不迟。

四、口语学习策略（根据北外网院曹文和王彤教授的讲座整理）

Strategies to improve your spoken English.

On April 21st, 2004, Prof. Wang Tong hosted a VOB program entitled “My Best Friend — Spoken English”. To my memory, the total number of participants at that time amounted to 160, which was a new record in the history of VOB. Undoubtedly, it also reflects the learners’ strong desires to speak good English.

In the program, Prof. Wang raised the typical problems of spoken English, i.e.

1. Grammatically wrong;
2. Poor pronunciation and intonation;
3.  Chinese English (Chinglish); 
4.  Lack of vocabulary;
5. Lack of fluency.

Of cause, she had given detailed solutions for each problem as well.

Alternatively, I want to show you one point made by Prof. Cao Wen, say, “Practice doesn’t always make perfect! Rapid progress lies in quality practice, active listening and guided speaking instead of quantity practice, passive listening and free speaking.”

Overall, I tend to use Prof. Cao’s theory as a principle or foundation, and Prof. Wang’s detailed solutions as the weapons to equip myself, and then, score some achievements in spoken English.

1.Principle:

• Quality practice instead of Quantity practice
• Active listening instead of Passive listening
• Guided speaking instead of Free speaking

Do you suffer from this? — “I believe that practice makes perfect. I do a great deal of listening and speaking practice everyday. Listening to or watching English programs on the radio or TV, talking to myself in English whenever possible. How come I don’t see much improvement in my listening and speaking abilities on the course? What should I do?” (Cao Wen) Well, that’s the result of “Quantity” practice “Passive” listening as well as “Free” speaking.

(In my class, some of my students read English every morning and watch CCTV-9 or listen to VOA radio broadcast programs whenever possible. Seemingly, the “exposure” is enough. Indeed, they do have made some progress, but I don’t think their extremely hard work only deserve such slow progress. The point is we should regard practice an approach, not the aim. It is the effect to which it is put that determines its value to us. If one approach has little effect on your progress, think the bottom cause over and, drop it without hesitation. Take my students as the example again, I find their problem in spoken English is not the pronunciation or intonation, nor is the lack of grammar usages or vocabulary. They obviously have stored lots of English in their heads. However, they have formed a bad habit of doing all these studies in a passive way, hardly the sort of active interactions are applied in their study process. That is the bottoms cause. In addition, “input” can not finally turns out “output” without using them in daily interactions; hence I encouraged them to form a small chat group and try to select a specific topic to talk about. Alternatively, participating in the VOB programs using the above-mentioned strategies is also effective. The most important thing is not to force themselves to try to practice everything in one go. Let the feeling of fluency and accuracy sink in bit by bit. )

2.Symptoms and solutions

1) Grammatically wrong
“Grammar, you have not mastered the basic grammatical knowledge of English, that’s why when you speak English, you feel that you always get stuck, you feel that grammar keeps you from going on, you have to concentrate on grammar. That is one typical problem for most BeiwaiOnline students. Especially, if you speak English with a lot of grammatical mistakes, a foreigner will treat you as a poorly educated person, so I highly recommend all of you to watch for grammatical mistakes in your oral English. Grammatical mistakes are unpardonable.” (Wang Tong)

Solutions: “When you are speaking English, do you feel a little person in your mind who keeps telling you that, ‘you should speak in this way, and you should speak in that way. That is the right word.’ For those students who haven’t such a feeling, it means that, maybe; you are in two situations, 1. You need to brush-up your English grammar; 2. Your English grammar is too good, is more than good. We call the little person in your mind a ‘monitor’. Especially when you are learning English at the very beginning, that monitor should keep telling you that, ‘Oh! You’re using he as a subject, you should add‘s’ or ‘es’ after the verb.’ If your English grammar is not adequate, the monitor is not born yet. That’s why you need to brush-up your English grammar. Or, probably your English grammar is already very good, and then, you can speak and think very fast, so that you don’t feel that monitor. But usually, you need to have a little monitor in your mind. Take me for example; I usually have a little person in mind when I speak English, telling me that, ‘Oh! Just now you made a grammatical mistake, and now you should speak in this way, this is the right word.’ Although you don’t feel the existence of that person, he should be there!” (Wang Tong)

(Well, as Francis Bacon put it, “Reading maketh a full man; conference, a ready man and writing an exact man. “ Personally, I find writing a practical way to refine the English that we have already possessed in our heads. Do you have an English – English Dictionary handy while you are writing? If not, you must get one and you might consult it whenever necessary. The purpose is the accuracy or correctness of your language. For instance, if your son and his younger brother are playing together, and suddenly, they begin to quarrel and even fight with each other. What is the elder boy supposed to do is to “humor” the younger one a bit. Here, the word ‘humor’ means ‘to do what someone wants or to pretend to agree with them so that they do not become upset’ (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 4th Edition). You see, that is what you can learn about accuracy from the dictionary.)

2) Poor pronunciation and intonation
“Chinese students’ English speaking don’t sound like English, because of the tone, because of the pronunciation and intonation.” (Wang Tong)

Solutions: “Some students said that fluency should come first, fluency is crucial in oral English, but you cannot speak fluently wrong English, you cannot afford to speak fluently wrong English. The solution to solve the problem of pronunciation and intonation is: listen (choose an appropriate type of listening materials) first, imitate (a tape, a teacher, a native speaker) as closely as possible (you might use a tape recorder to record your voice, and then, imitate and compare), and then you need to have sufficient amount of practice. At last, you need to use these skills or principles you’ve learnt. Learn them by heart! ” (Wang Tong)

(In her talk, Prof. Wang stated that it might be a torture for the students to practice the pronunciation and intonation, but, the process is worth gone through. Personally, I benefited a lot from “The Phonetics” written by Prof. Tu Pei. In that book, a detailed learning guide is shown and we can literally grasp the main features of English pronunciation and intonation step-by-step. I also hold a belief that one must master the pronunciation of every single phonetic symbol first, and then, he/she would be qualified to learn the rhythm and word/sentence stress.)

3) Chinese English (Chinglish)
“When students speak English, they first translate English in their head, in their mind and then, speak. I know that, most English learners do need to go through the painful process of translation, ‘mind-translation’, you translate in your mind, and then you speak. All of the Chinese students, including me, have gone through such long process. However, we need to end the process as soon as possible.” (Wang Tong)

Solutions: “This is a very typical and a very serious problem for most Chinese learners. Why? Because we are learning a foreign language which has its own idiomatic expressions, and its own language rules and regulations. That’s why we can’t create things, we cannot create expressions. What we can do is just to follow, to use their idiomatic expressions, not to create our own. For instance, “Are you hot?” is the accurate way to ask the other person’s feeling; we can’t use “Are you feeling hot?” The latter one is the Chinese translation. We Chinese people need to keep both eyes open, for idiomatic expressions and make use of them.” (Wang Tong)

4) Lack of adequate vocabulary
“Students don’t know how to express their ideas. They have so much to express, however they don’t know how to express it. That’s because they don’t have enough vocabulary. They know what to say, they don’t know how to say it well.” (Wang Tong)

Solutions: “Actually, when we are learning English, we are learning new English words, almost everyday. However, some students feel that they still speak middle school level English. Their English vocabulary is very limited, the level of their English is still the middle school level, and it has not been improved. Why? We know that your vocabulary contains two parts, one part is functional part or ‘core vocabulary’, these words can function very well in your oral English; however, the other part is called ‘recognizable vocabulary’, which means you can recognize them very well but cannot use them very well. For instance, some students can recognize so many very difficult English words in their reading; however they cannot use them in oral English. That’s because their ‘core vocabulary’ is so limited. So, we need to expand our ‘core vocabulary’, the ‘functional vocabulary’. Enlarge your core vocabulary.” (Wang Tong)

How can we expand our “core vocabulary”? According to Prof. Wang, on-campus students of Beijing Foreign Studies University are required to make five sentences with every new word, and then, the new word can probably become the “core vocabulary”. Personally, I have even higher expectations about the new words. I not only make sentences with the new word, but also use a thesaurus to find and memorize the synonyms as well as the antonyms of the word, for I find it crucial to know them, especially synonyms, to make my writing readable and colorful. In addition, you might keep a journal; write an essay everyday using the new words. The method is time-consuming, but rewarding! I am a good example; I upgraded my command of English through such intensive learning in less than three months!

5) Lack of fluency
“Students get stuck all the time when they are speaking English, that’s why they suffer from the lack of fluency.” (Wang Tong)

Solutions: “You need to practice as much as possible!” (Wang Tong)
The criteria or reasonable goals of one’s spoken English are accuracy and fluency. There’re several elements of ‘accuracy’, namely, a) adequate grammar; b) one needs to master functional and idiomatic expressions (for instance, in the bank, you ‘withdraw’ money rather than ‘get’ money, here, ‘withdraw’ is the functional expression in the bank); c) good pronunciation and intonation; d) enough vocabulary. As for fluency, we need the ‘speed’, of cause, based on accuracy. (Wang Tong)

Overall, I have learnt a lot from Prof. Wang Tong, especially the every day formula — High Quality Input = High Quality Output. What I want to point out is, I am not the only person who got the formula, and my classmates also know it, so why can’t they make rapid progress as I do? The reason is I actually applied this formula to upgrade my English, and I make action plans in order to achieve such ‘high quality’ study criteria – we must change our role from a listener to doer. I also want to encourage persons who didn’t make noticeable progress right now to carry on their study passionately. For after all, most of the potential successful learners stop right before they succeed, what we need is confidence and perseverance.

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