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Teaching English with three Hs (II)
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深圳外国语学校英语组组长 张建军
The purpose of high speed is to supply students with information at a considerable speed, leaving them no time to translate for comprehension.
When learning English, students have a tendency to depend on their mother tongue to understand. Thus their reading and listening are constantly interrupted because they are thinking what is the Chinese equivalent to a particular English word or words. This being the case, a coherent piece of reading or listening is broken into many fragments. As a result, students
often miss information and miss what the author is driving at. Therefore it is our task to train students to adjust themselves to quick reading and standard listening. We use high speed to reach this goal.
We divide reading into two kinds: quick reading and reading for further understanding. In quick reading, high speed limits students to timed reading. They have to exert themselves to fulfil the given task, applying quick reading techniques, reading with eyes. For if they read from lips, they run out of time half way. They learn to gather information directly from English, and try to follow the train of thoughts of the author or the development of a certain event. They may not grasp the details; they may only get simple obvious information; they may know roughly what a reading piece is about.
This already serves the purpose of quick reading. They at least know where to look for a specific piece of information, the writer’s viewpoint and the general idea. High speed governs the second part of reading as well. When students read for further understanding, they learn to read between lines, looking for implied meaning, put themselves in the writer’s position to gain a thorough understanding. We apply both reading skills in dealing with a text, while in extra reading, we use only quick reading and related techniques. Listening is in high speed. It comes in two forms: listening to
tapes and listening to the teacher. Tape listening has its own
characteristics. Once it starts, you listen, catch or miss and it is gone.
In order to get students used to the speed in tape listening, we use Lookahead to expose them as often as possible to dialogues and monologues covering a comparatively wide range of subjects. The speed of tape listening is close to the normal speed of the native speakers or are actually extracts
from a real situation. Besides tape listening, we try to maintain a similar speed when delivering explanations as well. So whether it is tape listening or teachers’ explaining, a fixed fast pace is set. Students are tuned to this pace day after day. In time they feel comfortable with it . At this stage, they begin to treat a listening piece as a whole and can develop
mental pictures out of what they hear. They rely on English for information.
High speed is applied in all the procedures of a class. We go through quick reading or listening, reading for further understanding, explanation, quick checking, extra reading and so on. The contents and activities may vary, but such a class doesn’t drag or slacken.
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