优秀演讲选手成长的启示(23980)-英语教育-(36)-21英语网

本文作者：丁言仁教授

　　优秀的英语演讲选手需要具备两方面的素质：对于演讲话题和听众的热情以及对于演讲语言的热爱。演讲选手应在日常生活中注重搜集演讲素材。成功演讲者的经验也将有助于我们进一步理解二语习得理论。

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　　GOOD speakers must have passion for their people. They must be in close touch with ordinary folk, share their feelings and be truly concerned about the issues they are faced with. Only when the speaker understands what their audience wants to say and wants to hear will they win its support.

　　As China's market grows and enjoys a booming economy, material wealth accumulates. However, accumulating at the lower end of the social spectrum are poverty, suffering and pain. These inequalities and injustices have received much public attention.

　　However, many college students in China are completely out of touch and have been like this since early childhood. As a result, when these students get to the podium, they are limited in what they can talk about: their personal life, their personal goals, or how much they love or are loved by their parents. They have few ideas about what is relevant to the concerns, worry and hopes of the majority of the people in China and the world. After we listen to a few of them, they begin to sound the same; they are dry and equally starved for content.

　　To guide students in the right direction, we encourage them to cultivate their true experiences and feelings. It is then important to use plain and simple English to share their experiences and feelings.

　　The second criterion for selecting students is their level of passion for English, the language they will be speaking. Learning English involves a lot of hardship and therefore requires whole-hearted commitment.

　　Passionate language learners are superior to other learners in many ways. In fact, their experience may enrich our understanding of second language acquisition, which is characterized by such theories as the Input Hypothesis (Krashen, 1985), Output Hypothesis (Swain & Lapkin, 1995), Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1996), and Noticing Hypothesis (Schimdt, 1990; 2001). When these theories are put together, they render a general picture that the learner's need for interaction leads him or her to notice the gap between the input and their own resources. The learner also borrows the features noticed in the input for productive use (output).

　　However, there are two questions these theories do not answer: (1) In the course of language use, learners have to direct most of their attention to the content of the communication, but not to the form (Van Patten, 1996). As a result, they often have limited comprehension, with no spare resources for noticing the "gaps" in pronunciation, intonation, collocation, diction and syntax. (2) Even if the learners do have noticed the gaps, they are often forced to empty their working memories for the next wave of incoming input. As a result, they abandon the new forms they have noticed rather than turning them into linguistic knowledge. Robinson (1995, p. 318) claims that "noticing" is "detection with awareness and rehearsal in short-term memory" and argues that such detection and rehearsal lead to "subsequent encoding in long-term memory." Current literature, however, is short on discussion of what makes effective rehearsal.

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　　丁言仁教授：南京大学外国语学院英语系教授、系主任。研究领域:应用语言学和二语习得。主要著作有《话语分析》《二语习得与外语教学》《英语语言学纲要》《英语新闻写作》等。