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2. College Integrated English Course
2.1. Nature of College Integrated English course
The college integrated English course was originally called intensive reading course, which was used until 1994 that the state Education Commission published the College English Syllabus. The College English course changed the Intensive Reading into the Integrated Course. As the basis of the comprehensive English curriculum, the Integrated English course focuses on promoting the students’ ability of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translating etc. the promotion of students' productive language skills. Accordingly, this course arranges its tasks combines with the basic language skills. Students are expected to ram their language foundation and acquire the comprehensive application ability after finishing the study tasks. On one hand, it consolidates students’ language foundation while mainly promoting students’ reading comprehension. On the other hand, it helps students to learn systematic basic language knowledge, such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, textual structure, etc. Meanwhile, it focuses on training students the comprehensive skills to use their language knowledge. It also tries to open a vision to students to have a better understanding and deep appreciation of foreign cultures and a good competence of communicative language.
2.2 Traditional Method in College Integrated English Course
The traditional teaching method in Integrated English Teaching, which is a thread of word-sentence-paragraph-text pattern, now is the predominant approach in college. It emphasizes on the practice of grammar structures, words and phrases instead of the language production. It also neglects the exploitation and appreciation of the beauty of text language. According to the traditional method, the appropriate understanding and grasp of structure and grammar in the text almost equal the prerequisite of comprehension and translation of the text. This method emphasizes grammar teaching by translating the mother tongue into the target language and vice versa.
The traditional method in Integrated English Language does have some negative influence on students' learning.
Placing literal comprehension in the first, it sacrifices inferential comprehension, critical comprehension and appreciative comprehension. Readers are passive and mechanic and they get literal meanings by means of decoding and processing words, grammar in the brain. The beauty of language and the interesting points of the text are neglected, which is a misrepresentation of language use to some degree. Under this method, students consider reading as something boring, tired of the overemphasis on isolated vocabulary and structures. The priority of the class seems to be the memorizing of vocabulary and structures. Many students have a good command of remembering new words and analyzing grammar, but a poor understanding of the whole texts. What most students get after class is nothing except a few isolated new words and expressions. Sometimes, even remembering new words is of low efficiency to students, because they learn vocabulary in a mechanical way. They used to remember them in isolation instead of learning in context. Obviously, this is the best and quickest way to forget the new words they get.
In traditional Integrated English class, the teacher plays a really dominant role, while the students do have few opportunities to express themselves, let alone taking part in some language practice. A class leads to low enthusiasm and tenuous initiative does no good for them to develop their communicative language competence. With the teacher dominating the teaching procedure, it seems that what they need to is just understand teachers' explanation but not the text. Active participation in the class and communication between teachers and students or among student is neglected. The teacher is regarded as the only source of knowledge, while the students is passive to receive knowledge and ready to take in whatever the teacher pass on to them. The imagination and creativity of students cannot be initiated in the process of their learning and thinking. Students usually get bored and even lose their interest in the English learning during the process. What’s more, the domination of the teacher may foster students' laziness and dependence. They used to wait for the explanations of the teacher.