In China, English teaching is greatly confined to the test-oriented education system and in this way, students often pursue high scores instead of truly emphasizing the application of English in their daily lives. Both teachers and students adopt the grammar-translation method, which focuses on vocabulary, grammar and linguistic phenomenon rather than on listening and speaking. The teaching pattern is text-based and teacher-dominated, and will inevitably prevent students from developing their creativities.
I used to be an English teacher in a vocational college of China and the ages of my students usually range from 17 to 21. In the process of English learning, students often confront with some concrete problems. For example, all the students learnt the dialogue: “How are you?” “Fine/Good.” However, when a foreigner asks them “How are you?” in their presence, most of them don’t know how to give response. Obviously, lots of students cannot transfer their theoretical knowledge into oral application. Many students always get high scores in English test but speak English stutteringly. Nowadays, in the campus, more and more college students are bothered by the CET (College English Test). They always hold a vocabulary book in their hands and make their efforts to memorize these words. They just mechanically stuff these vocabularies into their brains but rarely think of how to associate one word with other related words or how to use one word in a specified context. I still remember that many students asked me how to cope with English vocabularies and they often complained that it was really difficult to memorize them. In fact, how to memorize English vocabularies has become an obstacle for a great many Chinese students. Besides vocabularies, English grammar also upsets a large number of Chinese students. In China, English grammar teaching and learning is always regarded as the basis for English learning and students begin to learn grammar when they are in middle schools. Verb tenses, word collocations, countable nouns and uncountable nouns, subjunctive mood and all kinds of subordinate clauses are their weak points so English writing is becoming increasingly significant and should be given much attention. As for me, I gave my students an assignment that they must write a composition every week and I think it’s an indispensible way to check their comprehensive English levels.
To sum up, listening, speaking, reading and writing are four basic skills for Chinese students to learn English. Comparatively speaking, Chinese students are successful in reading and writing but fail in listening and speaking. Education system may not be subject to change in short period but what we can do is making some adjustments in curriculum and teaching methods, and trying to give better instructions to students.