Chapter Five The Oral Approach.docVIP

Chapter Five The Oral Approach Ⅰ.Key Points(学习要点) Definition(定义) The oral approach(口语法) (or Situational language teaching情景教学法) refers to an approach to language teaching developed by British applied linguistics from the 1930s to the 1960s. It is a grammar-based method in which principles of grammar and lexical gradation are used and new teaching points presented and practiced through meaningful situation-based activities. Background(产生背景) The oral approach originated with the work of British linguistics in the 1920s and 1930s. Two of the important and influential figures of the approach were Harold Palmer and A.S.Hornby(霍恩比). Both of them were familiar with the direct method, but they were dissatisfied with its practice, and they had recognized its limitation in their teaching experience of English. Therefore, what they attempted was to develop a methodology of language teaching that was theoretically well-graded, intellectually ordered and practically workable. The result was the development of an approach to methodology that involved systematic principles and procedures that could be applied to the selection and organization of the content of a language course. (因此，应用语言学家试图找到一种既按一定理论进行分级，又符合智力发展，同时实践上又可操作的语言教学法，结果他们创立了这样一种教学途径，这种教学途径有系统的原则和步骤，可用这些原则步骤来选择语言课程的内容。) Palmer spent many years in Japan working towards two complementary objectives in English language teaching. The first was the realization of the principles of the oral method in a concrete form. Another objective was to develop principles of vocabulary control. According to Palmer and some other linguists of that time, vocabulary played one of the most important role in foreign language learning, and frequency counts showed that a core of 2000 words occurred frequently in daily use and written text. This effort to introduce a scientific rationale for selecting attempts to establish principles of syllabus design in foreign language teaching. (这种给语言课程建立一个选择科学理论的努力,是在外语教学中建立课程大纲设计原则的最早尝试) Palmer and