In the spring of 1993, I applied not only for transformation to the title of an associate professor, but also for the excellent teaching achievement prize of the provincial level. It was two and a half years since I began to teach in Pengda, what kind of achievements could I present to apply for such a prize? After a careful consideration I decided to show my trump card---combination of my teaching practice with my theses already released, first running for the candidate in the whole school. The application material has been reserved up to now and copied as follows:
Grasp Key and Difficult Points and Improve Basic English Teaching
Defu Song
The tide of the reform and opening to the outside world has come and the students entering colleges and universities are anxious to improve their foreign language. We, English teachers, should take the advantage of this opportunity and help them lay solid basis of the English language in order that they can read large amount of professional materials, acquiring useful foreign information, and communicate with international friends orally or in written form.
According to this knowledge, I always grasp three basic aspects in the English teaching, basic pronunciation, basic vocabularies and basic grammar and pay attention not to circle and repeat in the same place. I try my best to add new content to every sphere, using the old to introducing the new, grasp key points, overcome difficult points, follow in proper order and advance gradually.
When I began to teach freshmen I will spend 4 periods reviewing and summarizing basic pronunciation and the spelling rules. In order to achieve the good result, I am not satisfied with the published article dealing with pronunciation and spelling and I classify all the words the students have learned during the middle school. On the basis of absorbing and digesting good results achieved by others, I put forward new ways to deal with some syllables. For example, the syllables: -re, -rre and -tion, -ision, -ician, -itial were named “combination disyllable” by me. Although they are disyllable, they cannot be divided. In addition, I use one sentence to summarize the way how to decide the adscription of the unique consonant in the middle of a disyllable. Does it belong to the first or the second syllable? The rule is that the middle consonant should belong to the second syllable unless the first syllable is a close one. I tested my summarization again and again, adding to my confidence, and lecture it to the students proficiently. I am not afraid of the questions from the students and help them with their pronunciation and spelling a great deal. My article “Words’ Pronunciation and Their Spelling Rules” has been recommended by the chief editor of “Middle School English Newspaper” Huang Guobin and I have received the letter from Shanxi People’s Publishing House. Recently I am sorting out and doing the work of weighing the words.
In order to help the students to grasp the pronunciation and spelling, I do my best to find the key and difficult points for them. According to my teaching experience of decades I divide syllables into three sorts: The first sort is relatively easy and most of the students have already remembered, such as open syllables, close syllables, single –r syllable, some vowel combination syllables. The second sort is somewhat difficult, mainly some vowel combination syllables, double –r syllable. The third sort is the most difficult, and they are diphthong plus –r syllables, -re syllables and some syllables not stressed. Such classification makes me summarize and explain repeatedly. I make full use of exercises and tests and perform the intensive training for the students to improve their pronunciation and remember English words precisely.
The other difficult point of the pronunciation is the stress of a word with multiple syllables. There are almost no rules for the student to follow concerned with the stress of the English word, which means the position of the stress is unpredictable. If you fall your stress on the incorrect syllable, the meaning of the word may be deviated or you cannot make it understood. In order to solve the problem, I read through a lot of works by linguists at home and abroad and discovered an important clue. A famous grammarian said with some classes of words, it is helpful and relevant to count syllables from the end rather than from the beginning. I was overjoyed as if I had found a precious treasure. I was not afraid of hardship and classified all the long words in the two teaching materials according to their ending syllables. In the end I summarized eight rules. For example, the words ending in –ic, -ical; -logy; -rian, -tion, -sion; -ity, etc. the stress falls on the syllable before these endings. I conveyed these rules to the students, whose response made me excited. I tried my best to enrich the content, underwentconsiderable revision and composed an article, which was contributed to the journey “Scientific English Learning” and released on Issue 9 of 1991.
Vocabularies are basic units of a language and ignoring them means giving up teaching the language. Vocabularies of the English language are as vast as the misty ocean, the total amount reaches more than two million. How can we recognize the key point in teaching them? According to the study of some linguists, the most frequently used words in English are about two thousand. Longman Group Ltd, London has published several dictionaries and all vocabulary entries in them are explained with these two thousand words. All the model sentences in them are constructed also with these two thousand words, which means that we can use these words to express whatever we want. When I teach words in the class, I regard the two thousand words as the basic vocabularies. I am strict with my students and ask them to be able to understand them when they read and hear and to be able to spell and to pronounce correctly. When I ask the students to do vocabulary exercises I write their names on the blackboard and give a score to each of them openly. The second sort is the intermediate vocabularies, 4000 words, namely the College English Test band four words of our country. At the beginning of learning 2000 words beyond the basic 2000 ones, I put forward the requirement that the students first learn to read and know their meanings and then gradually they should be able to speak and write sentences with them, i.e. from understanding to multiplexing. There are a lot of words in the text book beyond CET band 4 which I do not ask the students to keep in mind, let alone multiplexing. When the students get to know the key point and believe it is scientific, their efforts are made to full swing.
As more and more vocabularies arise in the text book, we come upon a lot of synonyms and near synonyms. It puzzled me a long time how to teach them to the students. I used to ignore the difference between then and said only that they are synonyms. It also took me a lot of time to explain the similarity and difference between them but I felt it unnecessary to do so. The last choice is to spur with long accumulation, namely, the teacher reads a lot, summarize and explain to the students with few words, so called “hit the nail on the head” or “shoot at the target with few words”. I have spent great efforts reading a lot of books and making notes. I divide the synonyms into groups and discriminate and analyze. To meet the need of my teaching, I always summarize the similarity and difference within one group of synonyms in a few words, forming the characteristics of my articles. The journey “English Language Learning” by Beijing University of Foreign Language Study, “English of Science and Technology Learning” i.e. “EST Learning”, and “English Knowledge” by Dalian Foreign Language Institute carried my articles on synonyms in 1992. These achievements helped me a lot with the vocabulary teaching in the class.
Entering the colleges and universities, the students do not need to spend a lot of time studying the grammar. The key point of the grammar is to grasp the basic sentence patterns and be proficient in using them to understand the long complex sentences. The core of the sentence pattern is the verb, so verb patterns should be practiced again and again. It is not an easy job to justify the sentence patterns because there are many patterns having superficially similar but basically different constructions, which may lead you to misunderstand them. As a teacher, s/he should be skillful at the recognition of all kinds of patterns in order to point out the difference between them with a few words, as if you were pouring water off a steep roof or looking down from a height. For example, in order to summarize the different meanings of the superficially similar patterns of V+ N1+ to V+ N2，I read the relative chapter of the CGE by Quirk and his co-authors again and again and compared what I had met during my teaching with their viewpoints. I discovered that what was written in the CGE was not reasonable. I wrote a letter to Quirk working in London University directly, expounding my opinion. Professor Quirk gave his approval opinions toward my letter, saying that I make a thoughtful and important point. Later I composed a thesis with more than 10000 words, which appeared in Shanghai University of Foreign Language Study’s Journal “Foreign Languages”, May Issue of 1992. These sorts of difficult points discovered in teaching always took me a lot of time and efforts, which pleased me very much. The teacher’s real understanding of a problem ensures him/her to come straight to the point without the slightest hesitation.
After more than twenty years of teaching the basic English, I have the idea that so called key and difficult points in the English language are those most frequently used by all fields of people, which are difficult for students to study and for teachers to lecture. In the course of teaching the basic English, it is unreasonable to grasp difficult points without considering the key points. If you did the unreasonable thing, you would lose the fundamental purpose of teaching English. To solve the difficult points is helpful for teaching the key points. What is mentioned above is the relationship between the key points and the difficult points.
The school organized an examination and appraisal group (EAG), led by the vice president and composed of dean of studies and some associate professors. All the applicants read the applying material to all the members of EAG and showed their achievements before them. The EGA members first released comments and then voted to choose one applicant who could report his or her materials to the provincial education committee. It was not long before I got to know that I was the approved applicant. In September of the same year, the list of teaching achievement prize was made public. My name was on the list and I was awarded the third prize. Generally speaking, the third prize was not worth mentioning. Yes, I had also such a feeling. However, you should know that Pengda was among the third, ie. last classes of the colleges and universities in Jiangsu Province. This prize added to my confidence in applying for the title of the professor later and had some influence on my life. Therefore, it was worth writing about it here.
April 26, 2010 in Xuzhou
Proofreading on Feb. 28, 2012, in Chicago
Uploading on Aug. 6, 2023 in Xuzhou
