Balancing Accuracy and Fluency in English Classroom Teaching to Improve Chinese Non-English Majors’ Oral English Ability

Abstract

With the globalization of the world economy, especially with China’s entry into the WTO, we will have to communicate more with people from all over the world in English, and as a result, an English learner’s communicative competence, especially his or her oral communicative competence, is becoming increasingly important. College students, especially the non-English majors, account for a significant proportion of English learners in China. As far as they are concerned, how to help them express themselves both accurately and fluently in our English classroom teaching has been a matter of concern to us teachers of English for quite a long time. But despite the fact that a variety of means have been tried, for various reasons, a large number of non-English majors still have much difficulty expressing themselves effectively. So this paper is intended to solve the problem. It first reveals the current overall level of the Chinese non-English majors’ spoken English, then probes into the factors responsible for their poor oral English ability, and finally proposes a practical, applicable and effective solution to the problem: balancing accuracy and fluency in English classroom teaching.