LECTURE ONE

INTRODUCTION:

By Alec

With the development of IT, the world has changed  profoundly over the past three decades. Technology and communication restrains are no longer limitations on the scope of globalization, which, for better or worse, has changed the way the world does almost everything. Though still in its early stages, it is obviously unstoppable. Today, people who have decided to go global, increasingly find themselves working in multi-lingua and multi-cultural environments, dealing with real differences in everything from communication styles to social etiquette to core values.

Doing things internationally means that you will come into increasing contact with individuals who speak different languages and live in different cultures. Even the simplest form of communication will become a challenge. In an era of globalization, distance and time, which were once the biggest obstacles to go global, are now among the least concerns for any organization or individual. Instead, we have to break down the other two barriers: language and culture, which vary from area to area.

You may ask: what does IT or globalization have to do with us English teachers?

The answer is obvious. Globalization requires that foreign language teaching should change from knowledge-oriented to skill- and cultural-oriented, or in other words, when we learn/teach a foreign language, we should learn/teach in the way we learn/teach our native language. 

It is unnecessary to repeat the importance of the English language in international affairs. But when we teach /learn English, what do we teach/learn? Traditionally, we present some linguistic knowledge, that is, a phrase or a sentence pattern or something else, and then we explain the knowledge, and then demonstrate and show how or where it can be used, and then tell the students to practice using it. That has been our teaching procedures. However, globalization requires that, of all the language skills, not only reading, which used to be the most important, but also the other three skills are as important, if not more important. Personally, I believe that speaking and listening (also understanding) skills are more important.

We all have noticed what a child does when it is learning a language. Psychologically, acquiring a language calls for three things: pre-dispositions, a preexisting system, and a competence. When a child is actually learning, it just learns by imitation, and nothing else, that is, it hears a sound or word, and it tries to produce the same, with or without understanding. A child learning its mother tongue never asks: Is that a noun or a verb mothers? Otherwise, it would be ridiculous.

New orientation in language teaching demands that we take a new look at language and language skills, reorganize linguistic knowledge system, and add new cultural and linguistic knowledge that is necessary in international communication, to our language teaching. Therefore, when we teach English,

1.We have to develop the four skills fully;

2.We have to reorganize or reconstruct the knowledge-oriented teaching approaches, which includes knowledge system reconstruction and knowledge renovation. We have to consider about the traditional language knowledge—phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. We have to consider what is necessary to teach, when to teach, how to teach, and where to teach.. About knowledge renovation, we have to consider about knowledge of social communicational techniques, of non-linguistic forms, of psycholinguistics, and of linguistic logic;

3.We have to develop and enrich language experience and language awareness. We have to change from product-oriented objectives for the process-oriented objectives. Thus we have to consider linguistic information input, linguistic redundancy, linguistic context and so forth; and

4.Students have to be able to or should learn to, think in English.

Students, if they start to learn English, should develop the four skills from the very beginning. They must have in mind that language must be performed in actual communication, that language must be proper in the actual communication, and that whether the communication is successful depends on the efficiency of language performance. They must also have in mind that language is embedded in gesture, that language goes along with prosodic features, that language varies in different situations, topics, and manners, and that language performance must be controlled.

IT is not only a challenge, but also a very powerful aid. IT provides a lot of new media that are available in language teaching. What we have to do is just to learn how to use them, which is a new subject for the English teachers to learn in the Informational Age.