2010-3-10 16:00 新航道外教口语俱乐部

采访人：Lui

Lack of practise is the root of Chinese students’ unskillfulness in speaking English. For Chinese students, their chances of speaking English with English-speaking people are very limited. And because of Chinese people’s faulty belief that speaking English with their Chinese partners is useless and inefficient, their chances of speaking out is further deprived, sadly, by themselves.

I always encourage my students in New Channel English Club to talk to each other and find every possible opportunity to speak in their daily life. Find yourself a loyal partner to talk with. Mind you, you have to talk consistently and when you talk, only one language is allowed, Chinese or English, do not put them together; when you cannot think of one word, do not use Chinese, you have to try to explain yourself in English, use another way to say it, remember, always be flexible.

Many Chinese students are concerned about not being able to talk about academic issues, like scientific, financial topics. And because of their apprehension and anxiety, they usually give up before even try and they are so worried about making mistakes and losing face. In my classes, I find many students with fairly big vocabulary, like 4000 or even more, however, most of them can only use less than 1000 words in conversation. So, don’t be so greedy and make the first 3000, 4000 words perfect before worrying about all the professional words. I want to remind you again, polish up your intermediate words and don’t mess with the difficult ones until you are ready. Don’t forget that we, English speaking people, also have problem with these words, so, take it easy and start with easy ones.

I have been living in China for many years and I personally understand and even feel the pressure that my students have. And because of this very pressure, many students are terrified of failure. They are not brave enough to speak English with other people, regardless of the nationality. So they all become Hamlet, in some way, murmuring, monologuing, memorizing other people’s speeches. It is necessary to talk with oneself, a very valuable supplement indeed. But overuse of this method could be embarrassing, by embarrassing I mean, when you are about to talk with one people, you find out that you can only memorize and unable to organize your own thoughts in English. None of the speeches you have memorized have made permanent residence in your brain. You need an environment in which you can fully immerse yourself into and have THE opportunity to polish up every single word you know and give them waking-up calls, so that they can be at your command.

I can speak fairly good Chinese--you can come to our club if you don’t believe me--so, I think that qualifies me to tell you what to do to perfect your oral English. I speak Chinese, read Chinese even dream in Chinese, and somehow I almost forget how to speak English. This is called immersion method and I made significant improvement by applying this method in my Chinese learning. You probably would say, "you are living in China, I don’t think how difficult that is." Well, that’s true. But, think again, is every non-Chinese speakers living in China speak Chinese as excellent as I do? Apparently not. Using it is the key, create it if you don’t have it. Or even better, join our club and together we are gonna create a refine, pure English environment which will benefit us all!

I am Robert, I’ll see you later. :-)