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【摘要】本文系为以交际语言教学法为指导原则的大学英语口语课堂设计实例提供有效性论证。该课堂设计遵循学生为中心及任务型学习原则，旨在提高学生英语流利程度，克服紧张，提升学生面对特定听众和在特定语境中实际口语交流能力，同时促进学生学习自治和生生互动。
【关键词】交际语言教学法 学生为中心教学法 任务型学习
【基金项目】中央高校基本科研业务费专项资金资助项目，课题编号 NKZXC10006。
【中图分类号】G642 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】2095-3089（2013）09-0129-03
Introduction
This lesson plan (Appendix 1) is designed for a Chinese speaking class that consists of 30 freshman students. It will be carried out in a 50?鄄mintue session.
It is composed of 5 procedures with activities designed based on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. It is task?鄄based and student?鄄centered. The aims of this lesson are to improve students’ communication skills, to reduce their anxiety while talking, to promote students’ interest and fluency in speaking within a context and in front an audience and to encourage cooperative learning, student?鄄student interaction and learner autonomy.
Detailed rationale for the aims of the lesson and for each stage of the lesson
The author have found that college freshman students in China are lack of interest and fluency in English speaking even though they have studied English for at least 6 years before they entered university. The reason for their lack of fluency in speaking is mainly because they almost always have learned English in “structure?鄄based methods” (Littlewood, p.118) and a PPP (‘presentation, practice, performance’) model (Foster, 1999, p. 69). Few communicative activities ever involved in their learning process. Thus it’s not surprising why their communicative ability is not satisfactory. This lesson plan is designed to address such needs among Chinese freshman college students. It is to help promote their interest in communicating in English by creating a special context that is of their interest.
In order to promote their communication abilities, the lesson plan adopts the communicative approach because:
The most important practical feature of the approach is its insistence on the active role of the learners in the classroom. The demands of communication mean that they must learn not only to respond but also to initiate. The demands of the learning process mean that they must become actively involved with the language(Littlewood, p. 120).
To achieve the ends of improving students’ communication skills and their speaking fluency, the lesson plan adopts the task?鄄based and learner?鄄centered pedagogies. Such are important parameters for CLT because CLT entails “a large proportion of ‘learner?鄄centered’ and ‘task?鄄based’ activities in which the learners operate outside the direct control of the teacher (Legutke&Thomas, 1991; Nunan, 1988; as cited in Littlewood, p. 120). “Task” in this context is defined as meaning?鄄focused activities in which learners use language for communicative purposes (Littlewood, p.121). In this lesson plan, students are given tasks to perform—first share their touching stories about their moms in pairs, then to derive a play from their best story among group members so that their communicative potential can be stretched and can come to the full play through such activities.
Students do the major work in this lesson plan because it is learner?鄄centered. The teacher acts as “a facilitator of learning” and an “animateur”, who stimulates an activity (Littlewood, p.123). It is designed this way to promote “learner autonomy” and students will have more chance to communicate with each other to improve their speaking fluency and to enhance their interest in communicating in English. They become “increasingly independent of the teacher, both as language users and as learners, so that they can not only communicate freely but also assume responsibility for their own learning” (Littlewood, p. 124).
The first stage of the lesson plan with the handouts of the poem (Appendix 2) and a popular song, both featuring on a mom’s love for her children, is to establish a context for the tasks. Brown included in his book “to encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts” as one of the “principles for designing speaking techniques” (p. 275). This can also increase students’ interest in talking because the topic is directly related to their life experience.
The second stage is getting the students to actually talk in pairs (or threesomes). Later they will need to select the best story in the group. Of course, they will work out to select the better one in the pair and the best among the threesome first and then determine the one to represent their group. This is to get them to practice their conversation skills for “the benchmark of successful language acquisition is almost always the demonstration of an ability to accomplish pragmatic goals through interactive discourse with other speakers of the language” (Brown, 2001, p. 267).
The third stage is to offer students an authentic task to perform, to promote cooperative learning and student?鄄student interaction and to ask students to perform their oral skills in a context. Task?鄄based is one of the key words for this lesson plan. By asking students to do such a project, the teacher gives students a task “to transact, rather than items to learn, provides an environment which best promotes the natural language learning” (Foster, p. 69). In the article “Key Concepts in ELT” published in the January 1999 issue of the ELT Journal, Foster further elaborates on the purpose and benefits of task?鄄based approach: By engaging in meaningful activities, such as problem?鄄solving, discussions, or narratives, the learner’s interlanguage system is stretched and encouraged to develop… These tasks rely on a successful transfer of meaning in order to be completed, and are supposed to focus the learners’ attention more closely on the comprehensibility of the language they and their partners are using, thus increasing the likelihood that interlanguage forms will be pushed towards target language norms. (p. 69)
The presentation of a play demands the students to cooperate and interact with each other. They need to compose a play together, to negotiate the plot, to take different roles, to practice and make it a perfect performance. The incorporation of the drama element into speaking class has been proven to be very effective in improving students’ oral communication skills:
Drama techniques can be particularly effective in developing oral language skills of English language learners. These activities are authentic because they involve language use in interactive contexts. They provide a format for using elements of real?鄄life conversation, such as repetitions, interruptions, hesitations, distractions, changes of topic, facial expressions, gestures, and idiolects (individual variations of dialect). (Forrest 1992; as cited in O’Malley & Pierce, 1996, p. 85)
Apart from further developing students’ interpersonal communication skills in spoken English, this stage also promotes cooperative learning. Students learn about each other through frequent student?鄄to?鄄student interaction in cooperative learning because “differences among students—such as cognitive and learning styles, social class, race and ethnicity, language, …—are viewed as resources” (Cox, 2005, p.167).
The fourth stage is to ask students to present the plays in class and this stage is designed to practice their oral skills in front of an audience and promote their learner autonomy. This stage demands the students to possess special skills for presenting the play and getting across to their audience. Moreover, they must show certain level of independence in carrying out this task which promotes their independence in learning. Henri Holec, the first scholar who proposed the notion of learner autonomy, wrote in his influential book Autonomy and Foreign Language Learning published by Pergamon Press on behalf of the Council of Europe:
“In its turn this new learning context changed the learner/learning relationship. The position of passivity and dependence in which the learner was necessarily confined because the knowledge was not accessible to him without the help of an expert?鄄teacher is no longer tenable. Freed from the need for a mediator actually possessing this knowledge, the learner is ipso facto freed from the need for mediatization (instruction): it is no longer essential for the learning to be taken charge of by the teacher, the learner himself can assume responsibility for it.(p. 21-22).” In this stage, students “take more control over and responsibility for their learning process” (Schwienhorst, 2003, p. 431). And the teachers must “help the learner acquire autonomy for himself, ie to learn to learn” (Holec, p. 23). Therefore, this approach boosts the students’ sense of responsibility and promotes their originality and productivity.
The fifth stage is the voting process and the rewarding of the best performers. This stage is to foster a spirit of competition among the students and ensure them that the good work will get rewarded. To let them taste the fruit of success is a way to make them feel their hard work appreciated and motivate them for further development. Furthermore, the rest of the class will have a good example to follow and work harder for later projects.
Discussion about the materials /resources used for the lesson plan
According to the author’s own teaching experience, students usually get very happy when the teacher uses authentic and interesting material on class. The reason for the choice of the poem as class hand?鄄out material is because it describes the importance of a mother’s love to her child in a very vivid and heartwarming way. It tells the influence of mom’s love—it lights up the child’s world and encourages the child to share love with others. The language is very beautiful with typical words involved with the topic—“The soft grace of your smile … The scent of your caress” (Appendix 2)—words that can activate students’ feelings toward their moms right away and students can pick them up to use in their own conversations. Plus, students can learn much more from this poem—about good values, loving others, etc.
The song is used to create the ambience for the classroom. Usually Chinese students have certain degree of anxiety in a speaking class. Actually anxiety is “one of the major obstacles learners have to overcome in learning to speak” and “our job as teachers is to provide the kind of warm, embracing climate that encourages students to speak” (Brown, p.269). My experience tells me one of the best ways to create this embracing climate is to play favorite music and songs of the students’. Music and songs make them feel at ease and they will be lit up and open themselves right away with the anxiety overcome. The class hence will be on the right track.
Moreover, students’ good feelings toward their moms will be generated (by the joint effect of the poem and the song) and their memories of touching stories about their moms would be activated as well. The poem can provide some key words about the topic—moms—thus generate more from students’ potential vocabulary to facilitate their subsequent talking. The song also gives some examples about memories of moms. Students may think of other poems about moms—in Chinese even, thus they will have a repertoire of language material to develop their conversation and formulate the plays. The small gifts to present to the winners at the end are used to motivate students to do their best and to ensure that their effort will be appreciated and rewarded. This has been talked about by Brown as a principle as well: “Try at all times to appeal to students’ ultimate goals and interests, to their need for … status, for achieving competence… and for being all that they can be’ ” (p. 275). Students will get motivated if they know their hard work will get awarded at the end.
Major interaction mode
The major interaction mode in this lesson plan is student?鄄student interaction in different scales—first as a pair (or three?鄄some), later in groups and at last on a whole class scale. The deliberate choice of this interaction mode is to be in accord with the CLT approach: to improve students’ communicative competency in oral English and also to promote cooperative learning and learner autonomy.
In this lesson plan, group work takes the bulk of the student?鄄student interaction. In groups, students “learn about each other as individuals, respect each other, and see each other as contributing members of the group” (Cox, p. 167). Moreover, David Nunan summarizes the pros of student?鄄student interaction in groups supported by researches in this area in his Language teaching methodology: a textbook for teachers:
It has been shown that learners use considerably more language, and exploit a greater range of language functions when working in small groups as opposed to teacher?鄄fronted tasks in which all students proceed in a lock?鄄step fashion (Long et al., 1976). Bruton and Samuda (1980) found that, contrary to popular belief, learners in small groups were capable of correcting one another successfully. Porter (1983, 1986) found (also contrary to popular opinion) that learners do not produce more errors or ‘learn each other’s mistakes’ when working together in small groups(2000, p. 51).
Apparently, students reap much benefit through their interaction with each other. They make adjustments in their conversations in order to get themselves across and such adjustments are believed to promote their acquisition and communication skills. Therefore, this student?鄄student interaction mode is preferred and chosen as the major mode for this lesson.
Conclusion
This lesson is designed with Communicative Language Teaching as the guiding Paradigm keeping Chinese college students’ needs in mind. It is learner?鄄centered and task?鄄based. It aims to enhance students speaking fluency with less anxiety, improve their communication skills within a context and in front of an audience and promote learner?鄄autonomy and student?鄄student interaction. Works Cited:
[1]Brown, H. D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd ed.). White Plains, N.Y.: Pearson Education.
[2]Foster, P. (1999). Key concepts in ELT. ELT Journal, 53/1, 69.
[3]Holec, Henri. (1981). Autonomy and foreign language learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
[4]Littlewood, W. (2004). Second language teaching methods: Historical and theoretical perspectives. Applied Language Studies, 8, 106-128.
[5]Nunan, D. ( 2000). Language teaching methodology: a textbook for teachers. Edinburgh: Pearson Education.
[6]O’Malley, J. M. & Pierce, L.V. (1996). Authentic assessment for English language learners: Practical approaches for teachers. Boston, M. A.: Addison-Wesly.
[7]Schwienhorst, K. (2003). Learner autonomy and tandem learning: putting principles into practice in synchronous and asynchronous telecommunications environments. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 16 (5), 427-443.
Appendix 1
Lesson Plan
Appendix 2
A Mother?蒺s Love Determines How
A mothe?蒺s love determines how
We love ourselves and others.
There is no sky we?蒺ll ever see
Not lit by that first love.
Stripped of love, the universe
Would drive us mad with pain;
But we are born into a world
That greets our cries with joy.
How much I owe you for the kiss
That told me who I was!
The greatest gift—a love of life—
Lay laughing in your eyes.
Because of you my world still has
The soft grace of your smile;
And every wind of fortune bears
The scent of your caress.
(Retrieved on Feb 20th, 2006 from http://www.poemsforfree.com/molove.html.)
Our mothers have shown great love for us, think about a touching story between your mom and you and tell it to your neighboring student.
作者简介：
胡阶娜：于南开大学英美文学专业获得硕士和学士学位，并于新加坡国立教育学院学习英语教学法和应用语言学。现任南开大学英语副教授，并于2013年2月至6月在台湾明道大学任客座副教授。
【关键词】交际语言教学法 学生为中心教学法 任务型学习
【基金项目】中央高校基本科研业务费专项资金资助项目，课题编号 NKZXC10006。
【中图分类号】G642 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】2095-3089（2013）09-0129-03
Introduction
This lesson plan (Appendix 1) is designed for a Chinese speaking class that consists of 30 freshman students. It will be carried out in a 50?鄄mintue session.
It is composed of 5 procedures with activities designed based on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. It is task?鄄based and student?鄄centered. The aims of this lesson are to improve students’ communication skills, to reduce their anxiety while talking, to promote students’ interest and fluency in speaking within a context and in front an audience and to encourage cooperative learning, student?鄄student interaction and learner autonomy.
Detailed rationale for the aims of the lesson and for each stage of the lesson
The author have found that college freshman students in China are lack of interest and fluency in English speaking even though they have studied English for at least 6 years before they entered university. The reason for their lack of fluency in speaking is mainly because they almost always have learned English in “structure?鄄based methods” (Littlewood, p.118) and a PPP (‘presentation, practice, performance’) model (Foster, 1999, p. 69). Few communicative activities ever involved in their learning process. Thus it’s not surprising why their communicative ability is not satisfactory. This lesson plan is designed to address such needs among Chinese freshman college students. It is to help promote their interest in communicating in English by creating a special context that is of their interest.
In order to promote their communication abilities, the lesson plan adopts the communicative approach because:
The most important practical feature of the approach is its insistence on the active role of the learners in the classroom. The demands of communication mean that they must learn not only to respond but also to initiate. The demands of the learning process mean that they must become actively involved with the language(Littlewood, p. 120).
To achieve the ends of improving students’ communication skills and their speaking fluency, the lesson plan adopts the task?鄄based and learner?鄄centered pedagogies. Such are important parameters for CLT because CLT entails “a large proportion of ‘learner?鄄centered’ and ‘task?鄄based’ activities in which the learners operate outside the direct control of the teacher (Legutke&Thomas, 1991; Nunan, 1988; as cited in Littlewood, p. 120). “Task” in this context is defined as meaning?鄄focused activities in which learners use language for communicative purposes (Littlewood, p.121). In this lesson plan, students are given tasks to perform—first share their touching stories about their moms in pairs, then to derive a play from their best story among group members so that their communicative potential can be stretched and can come to the full play through such activities.
Students do the major work in this lesson plan because it is learner?鄄centered. The teacher acts as “a facilitator of learning” and an “animateur”, who stimulates an activity (Littlewood, p.123). It is designed this way to promote “learner autonomy” and students will have more chance to communicate with each other to improve their speaking fluency and to enhance their interest in communicating in English. They become “increasingly independent of the teacher, both as language users and as learners, so that they can not only communicate freely but also assume responsibility for their own learning” (Littlewood, p. 124).
The first stage of the lesson plan with the handouts of the poem (Appendix 2) and a popular song, both featuring on a mom’s love for her children, is to establish a context for the tasks. Brown included in his book “to encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts” as one of the “principles for designing speaking techniques” (p. 275). This can also increase students’ interest in talking because the topic is directly related to their life experience.
The second stage is getting the students to actually talk in pairs (or threesomes). Later they will need to select the best story in the group. Of course, they will work out to select the better one in the pair and the best among the threesome first and then determine the one to represent their group. This is to get them to practice their conversation skills for “the benchmark of successful language acquisition is almost always the demonstration of an ability to accomplish pragmatic goals through interactive discourse with other speakers of the language” (Brown, 2001, p. 267).
The third stage is to offer students an authentic task to perform, to promote cooperative learning and student?鄄student interaction and to ask students to perform their oral skills in a context. Task?鄄based is one of the key words for this lesson plan. By asking students to do such a project, the teacher gives students a task “to transact, rather than items to learn, provides an environment which best promotes the natural language learning” (Foster, p. 69). In the article “Key Concepts in ELT” published in the January 1999 issue of the ELT Journal, Foster further elaborates on the purpose and benefits of task?鄄based approach: By engaging in meaningful activities, such as problem?鄄solving, discussions, or narratives, the learner’s interlanguage system is stretched and encouraged to develop… These tasks rely on a successful transfer of meaning in order to be completed, and are supposed to focus the learners’ attention more closely on the comprehensibility of the language they and their partners are using, thus increasing the likelihood that interlanguage forms will be pushed towards target language norms. (p. 69)
The presentation of a play demands the students to cooperate and interact with each other. They need to compose a play together, to negotiate the plot, to take different roles, to practice and make it a perfect performance. The incorporation of the drama element into speaking class has been proven to be very effective in improving students’ oral communication skills:
Drama techniques can be particularly effective in developing oral language skills of English language learners. These activities are authentic because they involve language use in interactive contexts. They provide a format for using elements of real?鄄life conversation, such as repetitions, interruptions, hesitations, distractions, changes of topic, facial expressions, gestures, and idiolects (individual variations of dialect). (Forrest 1992; as cited in O’Malley & Pierce, 1996, p. 85)
Apart from further developing students’ interpersonal communication skills in spoken English, this stage also promotes cooperative learning. Students learn about each other through frequent student?鄄to?鄄student interaction in cooperative learning because “differences among students—such as cognitive and learning styles, social class, race and ethnicity, language, …—are viewed as resources” (Cox, 2005, p.167).
The fourth stage is to ask students to present the plays in class and this stage is designed to practice their oral skills in front of an audience and promote their learner autonomy. This stage demands the students to possess special skills for presenting the play and getting across to their audience. Moreover, they must show certain level of independence in carrying out this task which promotes their independence in learning. Henri Holec, the first scholar who proposed the notion of learner autonomy, wrote in his influential book Autonomy and Foreign Language Learning published by Pergamon Press on behalf of the Council of Europe:
“In its turn this new learning context changed the learner/learning relationship. The position of passivity and dependence in which the learner was necessarily confined because the knowledge was not accessible to him without the help of an expert?鄄teacher is no longer tenable. Freed from the need for a mediator actually possessing this knowledge, the learner is ipso facto freed from the need for mediatization (instruction): it is no longer essential for the learning to be taken charge of by the teacher, the learner himself can assume responsibility for it.(p. 21-22).” In this stage, students “take more control over and responsibility for their learning process” (Schwienhorst, 2003, p. 431). And the teachers must “help the learner acquire autonomy for himself, ie to learn to learn” (Holec, p. 23). Therefore, this approach boosts the students’ sense of responsibility and promotes their originality and productivity.
The fifth stage is the voting process and the rewarding of the best performers. This stage is to foster a spirit of competition among the students and ensure them that the good work will get rewarded. To let them taste the fruit of success is a way to make them feel their hard work appreciated and motivate them for further development. Furthermore, the rest of the class will have a good example to follow and work harder for later projects.
Discussion about the materials /resources used for the lesson plan
According to the author’s own teaching experience, students usually get very happy when the teacher uses authentic and interesting material on class. The reason for the choice of the poem as class hand?鄄out material is because it describes the importance of a mother’s love to her child in a very vivid and heartwarming way. It tells the influence of mom’s love—it lights up the child’s world and encourages the child to share love with others. The language is very beautiful with typical words involved with the topic—“The soft grace of your smile … The scent of your caress” (Appendix 2)—words that can activate students’ feelings toward their moms right away and students can pick them up to use in their own conversations. Plus, students can learn much more from this poem—about good values, loving others, etc.
The song is used to create the ambience for the classroom. Usually Chinese students have certain degree of anxiety in a speaking class. Actually anxiety is “one of the major obstacles learners have to overcome in learning to speak” and “our job as teachers is to provide the kind of warm, embracing climate that encourages students to speak” (Brown, p.269). My experience tells me one of the best ways to create this embracing climate is to play favorite music and songs of the students’. Music and songs make them feel at ease and they will be lit up and open themselves right away with the anxiety overcome. The class hence will be on the right track.
Moreover, students’ good feelings toward their moms will be generated (by the joint effect of the poem and the song) and their memories of touching stories about their moms would be activated as well. The poem can provide some key words about the topic—moms—thus generate more from students’ potential vocabulary to facilitate their subsequent talking. The song also gives some examples about memories of moms. Students may think of other poems about moms—in Chinese even, thus they will have a repertoire of language material to develop their conversation and formulate the plays. The small gifts to present to the winners at the end are used to motivate students to do their best and to ensure that their effort will be appreciated and rewarded. This has been talked about by Brown as a principle as well: “Try at all times to appeal to students’ ultimate goals and interests, to their need for … status, for achieving competence… and for being all that they can be’ ” (p. 275). Students will get motivated if they know their hard work will get awarded at the end.
Major interaction mode
The major interaction mode in this lesson plan is student?鄄student interaction in different scales—first as a pair (or three?鄄some), later in groups and at last on a whole class scale. The deliberate choice of this interaction mode is to be in accord with the CLT approach: to improve students’ communicative competency in oral English and also to promote cooperative learning and learner autonomy.
In this lesson plan, group work takes the bulk of the student?鄄student interaction. In groups, students “learn about each other as individuals, respect each other, and see each other as contributing members of the group” (Cox, p. 167). Moreover, David Nunan summarizes the pros of student?鄄student interaction in groups supported by researches in this area in his Language teaching methodology: a textbook for teachers:
It has been shown that learners use considerably more language, and exploit a greater range of language functions when working in small groups as opposed to teacher?鄄fronted tasks in which all students proceed in a lock?鄄step fashion (Long et al., 1976). Bruton and Samuda (1980) found that, contrary to popular belief, learners in small groups were capable of correcting one another successfully. Porter (1983, 1986) found (also contrary to popular opinion) that learners do not produce more errors or ‘learn each other’s mistakes’ when working together in small groups(2000, p. 51).
Apparently, students reap much benefit through their interaction with each other. They make adjustments in their conversations in order to get themselves across and such adjustments are believed to promote their acquisition and communication skills. Therefore, this student?鄄student interaction mode is preferred and chosen as the major mode for this lesson.
Conclusion
This lesson is designed with Communicative Language Teaching as the guiding Paradigm keeping Chinese college students’ needs in mind. It is learner?鄄centered and task?鄄based. It aims to enhance students speaking fluency with less anxiety, improve their communication skills within a context and in front of an audience and promote learner?鄄autonomy and student?鄄student interaction. Works Cited:
[1]Brown, H. D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd ed.). White Plains, N.Y.: Pearson Education.
[2]Foster, P. (1999). Key concepts in ELT. ELT Journal, 53/1, 69.
[3]Holec, Henri. (1981). Autonomy and foreign language learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
[4]Littlewood, W. (2004). Second language teaching methods: Historical and theoretical perspectives. Applied Language Studies, 8, 106-128.
[5]Nunan, D. ( 2000). Language teaching methodology: a textbook for teachers. Edinburgh: Pearson Education.
[6]O’Malley, J. M. & Pierce, L.V. (1996). Authentic assessment for English language learners: Practical approaches for teachers. Boston, M. A.: Addison-Wesly.
[7]Schwienhorst, K. (2003). Learner autonomy and tandem learning: putting principles into practice in synchronous and asynchronous telecommunications environments. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 16 (5), 427-443.
Appendix 1
Lesson Plan
Appendix 2
A Mother?蒺s Love Determines How
A mothe?蒺s love determines how
We love ourselves and others.
There is no sky we?蒺ll ever see
Not lit by that first love.
Stripped of love, the universe
Would drive us mad with pain;
But we are born into a world
That greets our cries with joy.
How much I owe you for the kiss
That told me who I was!
The greatest gift—a love of life—
Lay laughing in your eyes.
Because of you my world still has
The soft grace of your smile;
And every wind of fortune bears
The scent of your caress.
(Retrieved on Feb 20th, 2006 from http://www.poemsforfree.com/molove.html.)
Our mothers have shown great love for us, think about a touching story between your mom and you and tell it to your neighboring student.
作者简介：
胡阶娜：于南开大学英美文学专业获得硕士和学士学位，并于新加坡国立教育学院学习英语教学法和应用语言学。现任南开大学英语副教授，并于2013年2月至6月在台湾明道大学任客座副教授。