Practice of integrated skills in English teaching.doc

Practice of integrated skills in English teaching Abstract: integrated skills training teaching has more and more for the general education worker place self-identity and accept this from the foreign and domestic two aspects, summarizes the research of the teaching mode and point out the significance of research space abroad monk deposit, the paper summarizes the research situation of domestic, the paper from the teaching mode of positiveKeywords: integrated skills training, English teaching, Positive roles; Training methodsBy continuing proceed the reform and open policy and also because of the increasing international culture interactions, English language teaching need to be emphasized on training the communicative skill and comprehensive skills of students. Therefore, during teaching, it is significant meaningful to implement comprehensive skills training and it is also a big mission to complete. According to the provision New high school English course standard which issued by The ministry of education in 2003, aim on training students skill of comprehensive language usage to achieve the target of English teaching. Based on learning English language, it requires the student can be able to understand the objective of learning English; stimulate the skill of self-study and team work; enhance the skill of learning strategy planning; master the way to get information, deal with information, analyze the problem and solve problem by using English. It also encourages student use English to the daily life in order to establish a good foundation for further study and development. HenceThe purpose of Practice of integrated skills in 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, But this is not the final purpose. The final purpose is to lot let students be able to use the language.Why do we study English? If a man is only good at listening and speaking, can we say that he is good at English? No, If a man is only good at reading and writing, can we say that he is good at the language? No, If a student is good at English, he should be able to use the language, both in spoking and writing.Now most of the students do better in reading and writing English than in listening and speaking. They can read and write, but they can hardly communicate. They can hardly express themselves with their own words. This is partially because of our examination system, and partially of the teaching method . We are not able to change the examination system, but we can improve our teaching method. Most of all the teachers like to provide the students with a lot of knowledge-words, phrases, grammar, usages and so on, They are focusing these thing, especially on the grammar. Yes, the students do need these, but many teachers forget to teach them how to study English, and how to use it. So when you are giving the knowledge to the students, don't forget to teach them all the abilities of the four skills. And listening ranks first among these four skills. Rivers investigates that listening contributes 45% of the actual situation of language application. Obviously it is an important means of communication and an important channel of knowledge and information acquisition. The improvement of junior high school students listening skill is very helpful to the development of their abilities of speaking, reading and writing. Therefore, great importance should be attached to the improvement of students listening skill in English teaching in school.However, the training of listening has not been placed in its proper position in traditional teaching for a long time and hence listening has long been a weak point. Many students think that listening is one of the most difficult things in English study, and even some of them have difficulty in understanding what their teachers teach in English. As the development of students listening skill has become the demand of schools New English Curriculum Standard, nowadays the training of listening has drawn unprecedented attention than before. How to increase the students skill in listening and how to improve students listening comprehension in the examination has been the common concern of many English teachers.Based on schema theory, this thesis tries to probe into junior high school students problems into listening and to seek solutions for these problems so as to improve their listening skill.Listeners listening skill is also influenced by psychological factors. Sometimes, listeners over-concentration on listening material leads to nervousness. “Anxiety has a negative effect on listening comprehension. ” Anxiety is a kind of fear; esp. as caused by uncertainty about something. It has been proved that anxiety has a negative effect on language learning.Psychological barriers mainly reflect in two aspects: the state of being too nervous or the state of being unable to focus ones attention during listening. In regular listening practice, some students cant concentrate on the listening content. Instead, they are absent-minded, wandering away, though they still wear their earphones. Such a state of listening, even lasting for only a few seconds, will result in broken listening, which, of course, will affect comprehension result. Some students are easy to be distracted because of being fatigued after listening for a long period. Anxiety often occurs in examination. Some students are too eager to get high marks but they are also afraid that they cant adjust themselves to the listening material and the delivery rate. So they become too nervous and blank-minded. Continuity and accuracy of listening cant be assured in such kind of state.1. Other internal factorsListeners age, attention span, memory span, and reaction sensitivity may affect their listening skill. Besides, listening comprehension is closely related to listeners experiences and educational background.2. External factors“The external factors that affect listening comprehension for both the first language and the second language listeners are mainly related to the type of language input and task and the context and co-text in which listening occurs. In terms of language input and task, research in both L1 and L2 has shown that important factors include:The degree of linguistic complexity (lexis and syntax)The length and conceptual difficulty of the textThe amount of time allowed to English listening comprehension is a rather troublesome problem for many English learners and teachers. But its really important. How to improve English listening is a concerning topic for English learners and teachers. The followings may help teachers develop their students listening skill. I think to cultivate students interest of listeningEinstein ever said, “Interest is the best teacher.” So cultivating students interest on learning cant be ignored. As soon as teachers make students interested in listening, they can motivate their enthusiasm and initiative. Listening must be the beginning step of English learning. Practice lis-tening and speaking together， students can improve the lis-tening skill by speaking. At the beginning of the listening, teachers should explain to students in humorous and lively ways in class, using simple means, expressions and actions. Teachers can also use the simple pictures to help students understand. Sometimes it is necessary to combine the key content and write a few Chinese words on the blackboard. It is helpful to develop students listening understanding in this way. With the students listening level improved, teachers can choose some lively language, more interesting conversa-tion stories, which can make students more interested in English listening. In order to do this, I sum up the following:1.To choose various, interesting and comparatively easy materialsSince lacking of practice in listening, even though some listening materials are much easier than reading materials are somewhat interesting, students would collect their mind and focus on the materials more easily. Once students find they can understand some parts of the materials, they will have a feeling of harvest so that they would have more interest in training of interesting.2. To lower the degree of difficulty and chose training stylesFor example, we may watch a slide show and listen to the tape at the same time or look at the materials while listen-ing. According to different difficulty degree, they can have the following training types: reading while listening; reading after listening; listening after reading; listening without reading. Here “reading” means “read materials” while “listening” means “listen to the record”. Difficulty could be controlled by various training styles. Before listening to materials, teachers should introduce the story briefly. We may also encourage the students to listen to English pop songs.3.Watch English language television and films. Thanks to satellite TV, British, American and Australian television programmes and films are widely available all over the world. Try watching with subtitles at first and them without them as you gain confidence.Listen to the radio. The BBC World Service is just one excellent source of spoken English and even broadcasts programmes for learners. English is the most widely used in the world. It is spoken not only in England, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand but also in many other countries in the world. It is reported that there're more than 20 countries and 550 million people to speak English is their native language. Though Chinese is spoken by the largest number of people in the world, yet it isn't the most widely used. English is a current language in the world.But, most students in the school accept English learning is exam-oriented primarily, dealing with all sorts of written primarily in the English examination, after years of English learning process, the teacher give students more vocabulary and grammar knowledge, can use English to communicate smoothly, the number of students is not many. "Dumb" English has become the biggest obstacle to learn English.in English teaching Teachers can do it by following steps:1 Body languageWhen teaching some verbs such as jump, smile, walk and run and so on, teachers may ask some students to act. Not only can it evoke students interest but also make the atmosphere of the class active.2 PerformanceSome texts in books are telling interesting and appealing stories. Teachers can make best of it and ask students to perform in groups. It can help them understand the text better as well as enrich the activities of a class and develop their speaking skills.3 English SongThere is no denying the fact that remembering lyric is much easier than remembering texts. We should teach them several English songs frequently and compose songs with the words they just have learnt else. When they sing the songs, they remember the words involuntarily and the children wont feel tired and bored at all.In a word, interest is the best teacher. We should do as much as we can to evoke, develop and cultivate their interest to learn English.Reading as well as listening is a chief means of obtaining information, and it is one of the important means of gaining different kinds of knowledge and of benefiting from the achievements. Individuals could not advance without reading, for reading can arouse peoples curiosity about the world and then develops their qualities in English language and humanities. Reading is an important language input. Therefore, the study of how to make good use of this means of input and optimize the reading input is of great significance. With the aim of making students have access to a lot of comprehensible and effective reading texts, the difficulty of materials, the sufficiency of reading and the method of reading teaching should be well studied. What are your purposes for reading? It is not very likely that you are interested in the pronunciation of what you read, nor you are interested in the grammatical structure. You read because you do want to get information from what you read, as well as to get enjoyment, ideas, and feelings. According to Christine Nuttall (2002, 8), reading is concerned with the transfer of meaning from mind to mind, the transfer of a message from writer to reader. Meaning comes from an interaction between thought and language, because reading is an active and interactive process.Reading is so important that we cant get rid of it in our daily life. This is one of the reasons why we should cultivate reading competence. In order to cultivate reading competence, the difficulty of materials should be appropriate for us to read. If we keep on having access to the level of “i+1” advocated by Krashen (1997), we can improve reading skill. How does learner cultivate reading competence? It can be described as follows: When you are reading a material in a language you have not yet acquired completely, and you understand what is said, the writer “casts a net” of structures around your current level. The net may include previously learned Stepping into expanded information times, English as a tool of communication has been playing a more significant role for collecting worldwide information and carrying out international exchanges and cooperation, which has been set high requirements on ones English skill in particular reading skill. Reading is one of the fourth basic skills of English. However, in schools, the situation of students reading skill is far from being satisfactory.For many students, they are afraid of reading and most of them show little interests in reading for the English reading is too boring and tedious to attract their attentions. In traditional reading class, the students are just passive to listen, take notes and then recite what they have written down. They lack autonomic learning for no time was left for themselves to think what they have learned in teacherdominant class. In order to search for a right way to solve the problem, numerous teachers have been devoted themselves to search for an effective teaching method to improve students reading . One of the favorable methods is cooperative learning.Cooperative learning is an old educational view and practice. In China, it began as early as 2000 years ago when the famous educational masterpiece Xueji (2007: 227) says: “Studying alone leads to ignorance and being illinformed.” But it was initiated by American scholars in 1970s, and made concrete progress and created a series of teaching theory and study strategy, which was widely used by other countries including China in 1990s. Actually, the nature of cooperative learning is group work and mutual help among group mates.As the increasing important role of reading, numbers of educators resorted to c