On Oral English Teaching in Vocational and Technical Colleges

Abstract:An unsatisfactory situation in the EFL classrooms is that the students can do quite well in examinations, but they can not express themselves in basic English. This paper presents the problems in the current oral teaching and learning situation in vocational and technical colleges, and proposes some solutions for reference.

1.Introduction

It is commonly experienced by teachers in vocational and technical colleges that they meet quiet learners in the EFL classrooms. The students have learned English for six years or more, but they can not answer very simple questions in English. Their English vocabulary is more than enough for them to use in order to express themselves, and also they have a good command of English grammar. Most of them have passed College English Test ( Level A and Level B ) and quite a few of them have got their College English Test Band Four certificates. But once they are asked to speak in class or before the instructors, many of them feel their minds blank and their tongues tied, exhibiting noticeable difficulties in using the language for oral communication.

2.Problems in Teaching and Learning

Like other vocational and technical colleges, our college suffers from a great shortage of teaching staff at all levels. The teacher and student ratio for English course is about 1: 120 in class. That is, one teacher has to undertake the whole process ofEnglish teaching : listening , speaking , reading and writing. It should still be feasible for teachers to conduct spoken English activities in the classroom, provided that they are well - trained to integrate the four communicative language skills in their daily teaching. But they have little opportunities for further improvement in their professional field.

In addition, the teachers suffer from time constraints. Although the newly - issued College English Teaching Syllabus outlines specific requirements with regard to speaking , it is still not feasible enough for the teachers to teach spoken English in a classroom setting of one teacher , averaging 40 or more students and six forty-five minute periods a week. The total instruction time is very limited. The teachers have to follow the syllabus strictly in order to fulfill the required teaching tasks. Under these constraints teachers are less able to listen or talk to students. They don’t have sufficient time to check for accuracy and correct errors, and they may also have more difficulties in organization and classroom management.

Our students come from different social, economic backgrounds and nationality groups, and many of them are from either rural or mountainous areas. Their language proficiency is greatly varied. Owing to the poor educational conditions and the exam - oriented language teaching and learning in middle schools , the students have never had adequate training in pronunciation and have had much less exposure to oral practice. An accent unavoidably affected by their local dialect as well as poor pronunciation make them tend to be more unresponsive when called to perform in speaking practice.

Low self - esteem is another direct cause resulting in students’ reluctance to participate in communicative activities. Many of them believe that their language skills are weaker than those of the others in the class or in the school. Their fear of making mistakes, judgment from the teacher or peers and their natural shyness at talking in public make them tend to keep silent in speaking activities. In fact, they did have something to say, as they told me afterwards in Chinese. But they just dare not say or unwilling to speak in the presence of others.

The influence of college English tests might also be responsible for the unsatisfactory situation. A typical test paper usually includes the following parts: Listening Comprehension, Vocabulary and Structure, Reading Comprehension, Cloze and Writing. Although the National Curriculum requires that students should have certain speaking ability, oral skill is not assessed regularly, systematically or formally. As a result, both teachers and students focus most of their attention and energy on other language skills, with speaking comparatively ignored.

3.How to solve the problems

Language teaching always starts from four aspects of proficiency: speaking, listening, reading and writing. These four skills are closely interrelated and should be treated as a whole. As Brown (1994:82) points out :“since part of the wholes of language includes the interrelationship of the ‘four skills’ (listening , speaking , reading , and writing ), we are compelled to attend conscientiously to the integration of two or more of the skills in our classroom.” There is no oral lesson in the school curriculum of our college, therefore, an optimal solution is to make good use of the time in listening, reading and writing lessons by letting the students talk spontaneously.

“We all learn to speak by listening. It is by listening and exchanging ideas that we can, on some occasion, best help our pupils to develop fully their powers of oral expression. ”(Carter 1985) . At the early stage of developing students’ speaking ability, the teacher may interact with the students by having them answer questions, retell passages in their own words or summarize the main ideas of what they have just heard. The students should also be allowed to freely express their personal views on various issues discussed in the recording. Alternatively, the teacher may ask the students to work in pairs or groups, listening and reporting to each other. The teacher would assist and supervise the students’ activities by supplying them with necessary vocabulary and encouraging feedback. This is a dynamic communication between everyone in the classroom, realizing an ideal language situation which has a high level of comprehensible input and oral productivity.

Another effective way to stimulate oral interactions among students is to use the text as starters for question - and - answer practice in the intensive and extensive lessons. The teacher preteaches certain related expressions and provides the whole class with a list of questions around the content of the text, involving the themes, the plots, the characters, the arguments and the like. The students are required to prepare these questions before coming to the reading lesson, and their answers should not only be based on the text but also on their experience and active thinking. Then in reading class, by using well - selected questions, the teacher can draw the students into discussion, allowing them to describe, analyze and explain the text among themselves. After finishing the text, the students will be asked to write a summary of the class discussion at home and then bring it to class for further discussion. This method can help students develop their oral skills by offering them more opportunities to listen and speak, reinforcing their comprehension of the text at the same time.

Speaking can, in fact , be a perfect lead-in to writing. According to Weissberg (1994) :“… writers may benefit from the use of talk to explore topics for compositions, to encode their ideas linguistically, and to bring to conscious awareness aspects of the writing process.” Usually, the teacher may first get the students engaged in “a group activity in which learners have a free and relatively unstructured discussion on an assigned topic as a way of generating ideas.”(Richards 1985) Then with the draft done, the students can exchange their work with each other, discuss about the content and organization, making suggestions for further revision. It is through the integration that the teacher may assist the students to develop their communicative skills both in speaking and writing.

Communicative Teaching

Grant (1987) claims that “learners dislike trying to speak until they feel confident. The trouble is that they won’t feel confident unless and until they do speak. ”Therefore, it is the teacher’s primary concern to provide the students with a communicative language teaching environment in which they feel free to use their active knowledge of English : a relaxed and lively atmosphere which encourages the students to practice their oral skills.

In the language learning process, the teacher plays an important role in influencing the students’ self - esteem, especially in speaking. Instead of taking the dominant position in the traditional teaching approach, the teacher need to assume new roles in activities : to make an activity proceed successfully, the teacher should act as an organizer at the beginning, giving instructions on the students’ pre -tasks and getting them prepared for later work. This may make the students feel more confident and comfortable to voice their thoughts because of the active thinking beforehand, thus promoting an urge for communication in the classroom. During the activity, the teacher may adapt his or her role to an adviser or a participant, helping out where necessary. This is advantageous for the teacher to observe the students individually and identify their strengths and weaknesses, and what’s more important, the teacher is placed in a position of equality with the students, helping to create a harmonious teaching environment in which learning tend to be more enjoyable and rewarding.

Group work, according to Nation (1989:22) , is most commonly used to get learners talking to each other by providing a relatively friendly setting and more supportive environment. Studies show that if just half of the class time is spent in group work, individual practice time can increase five - fold over that supplied by whole - class traditional methodology (Long and Porter 1985:208). In preparing group activities (group discussion, group debate, role play ), the teacher has to take two points into account. One is to activate participation : the teacher may divide the class into five or six groups , each group with six to eight students of different abilities, giving each member in the group a different job to do, or making tasks competitive. This will get students fully involved in the activities and enable every one of them to speak more. The other point is that the teacher should always keep the students’ background and interests in mind: usually the students feel more comfortable to talk about things they are familiar with. So it is necessary that the contents of the class be related to the students’ textual information (textbook, vocabulary, experiences, ) that can facilitate their communicative interaction. This will lower the possible barriers and stimulate students’ motivation to speak.

In communicative language teaching, it is perhaps one of the most difficult challenges and also of great importance for the teacher to developing an effective and efficient error correction approach. The teacher needs to create a supportive and relaxed atmosphere which can help students become more confident about expressing themselves freely and accept corrections not as something to be blamed for, but as something that comes natural and normal. Ideally, the correction should not in first instance come from the teacher, but from the students themselves, that is, making them learn from each other’s mistakes. This will ensure that language is used for communication and that learning is achieved by doing so.

4.Conclusion

Taking account of the main factors affecting the oral skills development of many vocational and technical college EFL learners’, the author suggests two possible solutions: integrated teaching and communicative teaching. Both techniques are aimed at creating more effective oral teaching and learning situation, helping students develop their overall communicative competence.References

Brown , H.D. (1994)Teaching by principles : An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy, Prentice - Hall

Townsend, J.S. (1998) Silent Voices : What happened to Quiet Students during Classroom Discussions?English Journal

Bob , Weissberg. (1994)Some functions of talk in the ESL composition class , Journal of Second Language Writing