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At the invitation of Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and Longman Asia Ltd, Professor L. G. Alexander has come to Beijing Foreign Studies University for a series of academic activity, which include this afternoon’s lecture on communication and grammar and next week’s seminar with several Chinese professors of English. Before the lecture let’s first have professor He Qixin, vice-president of Beijing Foreign Studies University to give a warm welcoming speech on behalf of our university. Professor He.

 

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, it’s my great pleasure to extend a warm welcome on behalf of the whole institution, Beijing Foreign Studies University to all the teachers and students of English from other universities and colleges in Beijing. As far as I can remember, it is quite uncommon for such a large number of students from various institutions in Beijing to be together. But today is a very special occasion, because as you can see from the band behind me, we are here to meet a very special man, a man of international eminence, a man who has been enjoying ever since the late 1970s and ever growing popularity among Chinese readers, especially Chinese learners of English, and his name is Louis Alexander.

The name of Professor Alexander is known to almost every household in China for the simple reason that he is the author of New Concept English, the best circulated English textbooks in China in the last twenty years, so it is not surprising that the receptionist at Shangri-La Hotel recognized his name immediately while he was filling out the registration form and taken from behind the registration counter a copy of New Concept English asking for his signature.

Professor Alexander is a prolific author and his name is associated with dozens of books in the field of English language teaching, such as Look Listen and Learn, For and Against, and the well-known English TV series ‘Follow Me’, so it is very fortunate for us to have Professor Alexander here today and I’m sure with his expertise in English language teaching, his lecture today will be most informative and inspiring as well.

 

Next let’s welcome Mr. William Shen, president of Longman Asia Ltd. Mr. Shen.

 

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Professor He Qixin and Mr. Li Pengyi of Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, President for inviting me here today. Now it gives me great pleasure to introduce Mr. Louis Alexander to you all, who has been an author with Longman for more than thirty years. The relationship between Longman and Mr. Alexander is not only very long but also highly successful. Longman is one of the largest English language textbook publishers in the world. While Mr. Alexander is probably the most famous English language teaching author in the world. I hope, just as Mr. He from China the most well-known works done by Professor Alexander includes ‘Follow Me’ and ‘New Concept English’, which I’m sure you are familiar with. When we arrived in Beijing a few days ago, we were again reminded how successful New Concept English is. As we checked in at the hotel, even before we managed to get our keys, the girls behind the counter recognized Mr. Alexander’s name and they all produced their books and asked for his signature. Anyway I hope you enjoy Mr. Alexander’s talk today and you will take this good opportunity to ask him a lot of questions about English language today. Thank you.

 

The next speaker is Mr. Li Pengyi, President of Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press. Mr. Li.

 

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Please allow me, on behalf of Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, to extend my heart-full thanks to Professor L. G. Alexander who has come here all the way from London to Beijing. My special thanks to Mr. William Shen, President of Longman Asia Ltd and his colleagues, and I would also like to express my thanks to Professor He Qinxin, Vice-President of Beijing Foreign Studies University and all the attendants. L. G. Alexander is a name familiar to almost all English language teachers and learners here in China. I’m quite sure that an overwhelming majority of those who are attending today’s lecture have, in one way or another benefited from the textbooks compiled (by Mr. Louis Alexander). For learners of English as a second language, regarding to English language teaching materials, I would like to underline here that my Press is one of the few major publishing houses in this area in the country. We have published many series of English language teaching materials ranging from those for children, for middle school students, for college students and for adult learners. In the past few years, took up the challenge of competition in the publishing market, our international activities are increasingly significant. We have established close ties with the world famous publishers like Longman Asia Ltd. Our long-term co-operations have been very fruitful. And today is an important occasion symbolizing another significant co-operation with international partner. We are jointly planning for a textbook project involving Longman Asia Ltd and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press with Professor L. G. Alexander. This co-operation I’m quite sure will benefit not only the presses involved but also the English language teachers and learners here in China. I’m afraid we have to wait for some time for the new books to be out. But I know you can’t wait for (you can’t wait to hear) Professor L. G. Alexander to speak to us. So with great pleasure I give the chair to him. Thank you.

 

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. First I’d like to thank my colleagues for their very generous introduction and particularly now I’d like to thank you all for coming on this occasion. It’s a great privilege for me to be here to be able to address you and to satisfy your curiosity. I know from many years of teaching experience when I was a young teacher especially when I had a textbook in my hand and I kept looking at the same name, I kept wondering, I wonder what this person is like, I wonder if I could ever meet him or her, I know that feeling very well. And that feeling, I hope will satisfy this afternoon. I know the name YA LI SHAN DA (亚历山大) is very well-known to you, from textbooks and so on. And it may surprise you here that this is my third visit to Beijing. I have been here another two occasions, I came in 1981 when I spent a month traveling through the country and lecturing. I came again in 1988 because I was associated with Junior English for China with PEP (人民教育出版社) , and I’m here again at the invitation of Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (外研社) . That is why I’m able, through your generosity of inviting me to be able to address you. Now we have about an hour, I need about an hour to speak to you about this subject – communication and grammar. When I finish speaking, just after 3: 15 now on, if you want to ask me any question, you may, it’s a very large audience, and it’s probably difficult for you to stand up and ask a question, but if you wish to write a question and there’s time I will be happy to answer it, but it will have to be a question on language. My theme this afternoon is communication and grammar (我今天下午的演讲主题是交流与语法), in another word, the rule of grammar in English language teaching today. “Does grammar still have a relevance?” I hear him making mouth in the background. Does language teaching, does grammar still have a relevance when we are teaching for communication? And I think it is a very important question. When we look at the way language was taught in the past, we based our language teaching on what we call the grammar translation method. All of you know about this method, consist of books which give you lots of rules with translation exercises from English and into English, and you have to get the language right, the grammar right, and you could spend many many years doing these exercises and never becoming fluent in a language. There are very good reasons why you never become fluent when using the grammar translation method. One of those reasons is that teachers were encouraged all the time to talk about the language, never to use it. And the language was like a patient on the operating table with various doctors going over it, talking about it but never doing anything to cure it and make it get up and walk again. And what we are concerned with is to make language alive, to consider that language is not some dead object we study but a performance skill. We think of language not about how much we know about it but how well we can perform it – how well we can speak it, how well we can understand it, how well we can use it. And that is what we are concerned with in language teaching today. I have been in classes where I have heard a whole lesson in English conducted in the students’ own language. I remember one lesson I attended where I heard the teacher speak for something like 15 minutes and the teacher spoke entirely in the students’ language. I only heard three words of English during that lesson, and those words were Anglo-Saxon genitive. So obviously if we teach like that, we teach a living language as if it were a dead language, then that language would remain permanently dead. So one reason that students fail to learn through the grammar translation method was that they were always talking about language. It was always knowledge not performance. The second reason why students couldn’t learn from the grammar translation method was that they couldn’t transfer the knowledge they had from the grammar book to real life. So that knowledge was permanently frozen. When I began teaching English as a young man, I was given one book to teach English to teach from and it was called Living English Structure. It was a set of grammatical exercises with a rule at the top, a lot of sentences to fill in the blanks and then the students somehow by some miracle were expected to perform from this. And I quickly realized that you couldn’t learn a modern language in that way. You could use this information for certain purposes, but you couldn’t learn a language only in that way. You have to have human situations, you have to have texts, you have to have activities, you have to train the students in the four primary skills of understanding, speaking, reading and writing because language is not just grammar. How are things changed today? Well today our emphasis is on communication. We want to get students to perform in understanding, speaking, reading and writing. So we have realized one of the highest priorities when we are learning a language is listening comprehension. Everything begins with listening comprehension. You are exercising listening comprehension now. If you can’t understand what I’m saying, then you’re in deep trouble. And listening comprehension is the first step in language acquisition and what we have to train our students in before they can speak. They go through a kind of silent period where they are taking in a lot of language before they can give out a lot of language. That is a very very slow business because learning a language is slow and cumulative. You can never learn a language in twenty-four hours as many advertisements promise you. I don’t know if you have this in China. But certainly in Europe newspapers are full of advertisements of how you can learn a language in two weeks of study, learn to be a concert pianist after 5 hours at the piano, learn to be a linguist after using this magic tape. Well if there were such simple solutions, you and I would surely know about them. We work all our lives to learn languages, so there can’t be simple solutions. Why is it impossible to learn a language in a short period? The answer is listening comprehension. You can learn a lot of phrases, you can learn to ask the way to a station and order a cup of coffee and so on, but you have to listen to many hundreds of hours of English or any foreign language before you can understand it. And that is why it’s a long term study. Children of course are born with a language instinct, that’s how we acquired our mother tongues. But when we get beyond the age of five, six, seven, life becomes more difficult when language acquisition is concerned. When we speak of communication, we find that what we mean by communication is the ability to do things through language. If you look at all the textbooks, they were full of completely unnecessary bits of language and completely useless bits of language, things like “this is my head, this is my nose” and so on, or “Has she milked the cows yet? “ and so on.. .In other words, these are of the English we would never use in several life times. I want to quote an advertisement to you which is from AT&T the big American telephone company, and I want you to try to understand what communicators mean by communication. Telecommunication has the word communication in it, it’s about telecommunication. This advertisement reads like this: This machine communicates over a hundred and fifty words per minute across oceans at less than one and half cents per word. It also listens, reacts, sympathizes, charms, persuades, pleads, apologizes, sues, explores, informs, explains and that’s whatever else it takes to solve the problem or close the sale. What’s this machine? Of course this machine is the telephone. And all those things we talked about here are what we do through language--- Listen, react, sympathize, charm, persuade, apologize, sue, explore, inform, explain, and we can do on and on and on.. Doing things through language is communication. And therefore what we are concentrated today is teaching communication skills.

第三部分的音频总是贴不上来，总是被删。(The third part is always being deleted after posted)现在贴上我在土豆网的链接，大家可以在这里听一下：

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/Ygmpu4979G8/