The Four Abilities in Middle School English Teaching

盧衛(wèi)娟

【Abstract】 The purpose of middle school English teaching is to improve the students four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, with the base of necessary phonetics, large vocabulary and good grammar. So when you are giving the knowledge to the students, dont forget to teach them all the abilities of the four skills.

【Key Words】 skills abilities English teaching middle schools

Now in English-learning most of the students do better in reading and writing than in listening and speaking. They can read and write properly, but they can hardly communicate or express themselves with their own words. As far as I am concerned, this is partially because of our examination system, and partially of the teaching method. As a teacher, what we should do is how to improve our teaching method rather than look forward to the change of the national examination system.

1. Listening

I think the phonetic symbol is the base, on which a good intonation and phonetic depends Oral reading after a radio or a teacher is a good way at the beginning, Students should do much about it.

Broaden the students back-ground knowledge about English-speaking countries. Encourage the students to read a lot in their spare time about geography, history, culture, stories and so on... Both listening test and listening practice are necessary, but practice is even more important. Only through enough practice can the students improve their listening comprehension.

2. Speaking

Speaking cant be taught separately, which is often closely connected with listening. The traditional way of listening and speaking is aural-oral method. Now, the new method of two-way communication is very popular.

The aural-oral method is not an out-of-date one, but a useful one; especially it is fit for the beginning stage. And it attaches the importance to the oral drills, and has a bad communicative function, which is only used to phonetic base. After all, the aim of the language learning is to communicate. So the two-way communication is more effective and direct, but it is only good at the beginning stage.

3. Reading

Reading is an important way of gaining information in foreign language learning, and one of the basic skills for a foreign language learner. Too many new words not only affect the reading-speed but frustrate the confidence and desire to go on reading. One way to overcome this problem is to find the proper reading material and make a guess whenever coming across words we dont know. There are many ways to guess the meaning of a new word, which are as follows:

First you should find some hints: context, some phrases, such as “means, ‘refer to”, ‘in other words, “that is to say”.

Then browse the article. When you have the first glance over the article, youve got the key to questions and you may have some idea of the outline of the article, then you may read the whole material

4. Writing

Writing is one way of providing variety in classroom procedures. It provides a student with physical evidence of his achievements and becomes a course whereby he can measure his improvement.

In my opinion, sentences are the basic elements of an article. So we should begin our writing with sentences. First, students should be asked to express with sentences

-sentences making, then to write short articles.

Generally speaking, above all, while you are training these four skills, youd better make full use of your teaching instruments or varieties of ways to stimulate the students interests. And then these four skills cant be separated. People often say “First listening and speaking, then reading and writing”. Thats absolutely right. But I think this way of saying is not fit for all the different stages. For a senior middle school student, reading and writing is more important in order to meet the requirements of the yearly national entrance examination and the development of society.

References

[1] 周流溪. 中國中學(xué)英語教育百科全書[M]. 沈陽：東北大學(xué)出版社, 1995.

[2] Huang Yuefa. English Teaching Methodology[M]. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1991.■

endprint