New Oriental teacher shares: What students should do in speaking class

1. Open your mouth and practice repeatedly

A few days ago, a student asked me about a good way to improve speaking. My answer is only eight words - understand the sentence pattern and keep repeating it. Many students who have taken oral English classes will find that the content taught by the teacher in the oral English class is much less than that of some basic courses, e.g. New Concepts 2 or 3 volumes. In the oral English class, the content taught by the teacher is even more extensive. Simple. Therefore, students often question: 'Should I take such a simple thing? 'My answer - you must go! In fact, in speaking classes, our real purpose is not to teach much knowledge, nor to remediate grammar knowledge for students, but for teachers to create context through the most basic and simple explanations and the most practical guidance to keep students moving their mouths. , constant interaction. The ultimate goal is to use your mouth to express the sentences and sentence patterns that you understand but cannot say as fluently as possible, so that you can blurt out all the sentence patterns like 'what's your name?'.

Affected by our inherent English learning methods, many Chinese students always focus on grammar when learning sentence patterns. This causes students to constantly consider grammatical issues during oral interactions. Let me talk about my understanding below:

A few days ago, a classmate who was studying Interchange (Cambridge English Speaking Course) asked me in class: 'Teacher! I understand the meaning of this sentence, but how should I understand this grammatical phenomenon? 'My answer - as far as speaking is concerned, as long as you understand the meaning of the sentence and know in what context the sentence pattern is used, it is enough! For example, in the Interchange volume, there is a topic that requires students to use the present perfect tense to express 'where they have been and what they have done'. As far as this sentence pattern is concerned, the grammar I taught was minimal, and the only thing I did was to give students a few fixed sentence patterns and constantly guide them to apply them. After making sentences, immediately show some pictures and place names of tourist attractions on the PPT, and then use Role Play to let them continue to imitate and interact in the context. Through my oral teaching experience, I came to the conclusion: 'As long as students can fluently repeat an unfamiliar grammatical sentence pattern 5-8 times in a specific context, their proficiency in using the sentence pattern will increase. Very high'. Even if they have not learned grammar, they can understand the sentence patterns embodied in this grammar.