A Discussion About Spoken English Teaching_英语毕业论文.docVIP

A Discussion About Spoken English Teaching Being one of the four micro skills of English language, speaking plays an important role. Practically speaking, it can reflect one’s English proficiency directly, which is bound up with job-hunting, social communication etc. On the other hand, together with speaking, it is productive skill, through which language learners produce output. According to Swain’s “Output Hypothesis” and Long’s “Interactional Hypothesis”, language learners’ out put is significant in the process of second language acquisition (SLA). Thus, speaking can also facilitate language acquisition. Based on some theories, previous studies and the realities of spoken English teaching in China, this essay aims to discuss spoken English teaching from two aspects: what to teach and how to teach. 1. What to Teach 1.1 Communicative Competence Before the discussion about what to teach in spoken English class, there should be an insight into the levels of knowledge and skills involved in language use. Canal and Swain (1980) termed the knowledge and skills involved in language use as “Communicative Competence”, which they divided into three levels: grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic. Keith Johnson renamed the first one as “systematic”. Systematic competence covers the knowledge and skills related to the way language works as a system. This competence includes knowledge and skills about pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), grammar (morphology and syntax) and words meanings (semantics). Even hand writing, spelling and punctuation are involved which are “mechanical skills”. Sociolinguistic competence can be further divided into “rules of use” and “rules of discourse”. The former one means how to use language appropriately in different contexts. The contexts here can refer to both different countries and some concrete situations (e.g. wedding funeral; restaurants shops). In different countries with different culture and customs, speakers should obey local “