Sách Fast Fluency - Communication in English for the International Age

Fast Fluency - Communication in English for the International Age

A conversational textbook should provide provide students with language they can use and it should furnish something they can talk about. This book strives to do both by offering the student concrete language and adult subject matter useful for communication in contemporary, everyday English.


The Student
T ‘ aS'iutage IS A TOOL Like ill tools, it has many uses, but it is nut worth very much by itself. Wc use language to express thoughts or feelings. Grammar and words alone art not as important as the content of what you say. In fact, without content and meaning, language would be useless.
I.anguage, then, is a way to communicate what you need, want, think, or feel- This is true of all languages, not only English. Your native language and English are very similar, Roth are used to communicate with other human beings. This is true of all languages in all countries.
How can I lcam to speak English?
English is not a mystery or secret. Anybody can learn it asa second language, and millions of people do every year, but if you want 1o learn to speak English, you must be willingtodn two things: Make mistakes and take chances.
When you speak English, you will make some mistakes because nobody can start speaking a foreign language perfectly from ihestart. Ifyou wait until you know all the words and forms perfectly» you will never be able tu speak English. So start now, wherever you are in your English studies, and speak the best way you can. You can learn new words and better grammar later, but if you don't start talking now, you will never improve.
This is why it is important to take chances. If you wait until you are sure that everything you say will be perfect, you will wait a long lime. Maybe forever! Don’t be afraid to say what you want to—now. Ifyou make a mistake this time, that's O. K. Ifyou arc shy at first, don’t worry, The next time it will be easier. The more mistakes you make and the more chances you take, (lie easier it will be to speak without fear.
What about grammar? What happens if you don’t speak correct English? Of course, sometimes people might not always undcrstandyou, but even with speakers o four native language, we often need to explain things in a diifcrcnt way. If people don't understand what you say at first, you can try it agai n a different way. And ifyou don’t understand another person, you can ask them again, and they will usually explain it another way until you understand


Will this book help me?
Fast Fluency is filled with interesting communication activities that give you an opportunity to use your English to talk about all sorts of things. But you can’t simply read it, you must speak with other people.
If you study the conversations and variations in these lessons, practice speaking with your classmatcs, and discuss the topics given in this book, your English will definitely improve. You can learn to read a language alone in your room, with a dictionary and a grammar book, but you cannot learn to speak a language by yourself. You must have a conversation partner to talk with and something interesting to talk about.
Language and life are always full of surprises. When you are having a conversation with someone (in any language) you never know what the oth er person is going to say next. And like life itself, learning to speak a language can be a great adventure—if you are willing to be a little daring and take a lew chances. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your spoken English isnow.Ifyou study the material here and practice with your classmates, it will get better. That is a guarantee. Will your English be perfect? Of course not, but it will improve and you will have much more confidence andspeaking ability when you finish this book. I hope you enjoy it. Good luck!


To The Teacher A
J. Y. CONVERSATIONAL TEXTBOOK should provide StudciltS with language they can use and it should furnish something they can talk about. This book strives to do both by offering the student concrete language and adult subject matter useful for communi­cating in contemporary, everyday English.
Most of us have never found theperfect textbook, and this one doubtless has its faults too, but I have tried to steer a course
between the two extremes of conversotionol textbooks as 1 see them: an overabundance of content on the one hand and a concentration on structure to the detriment of communication and meaning on the other. While the assumption here is that students already have a basic working knowledge of English structure and lexicon, there is a consistent attempt to make students familiar with some of the most important functions and patterns of spoken English.
The premise of the book is that language is communica­tion, not a puzzle, not a complex system of rules, not a medium for testing intelligence. The purpose of language is to communicate with other people 011 subjects of mutual interest to the speakers, whether that be finding out where the bus stops or discussing geopolitical issues. In thisspirit,! havctriedtogivestudentsample
matciial foi |^i aclkiugbai.ii. survival English as well as for express­ing themselves on a wide variety of subjects.
There arc twenty lessons, and teachers may cover them in any order. They are not graded, and each onecontains very simple as well as more difficult and less frequently-uscd language items. While there is a certain logic to the presentation of the subject matter of the conversations, the level of difficulty remains more or less uniform throughout. Early lessons treat greetings, introduc­tions, and small talk—topics and functions which often occur early in relationships or in initial encounters with strangers—but they need not be covered during the first few weeks of the course. It is not always easy for students to deal with these social functions early in the course when they are still uncomfortable talking with their classmates and may likely not even know them. These pedagogical matters are, of course, up to the individual teacher to decide. While the structural patterns and functional applications introduced throughout reflect the author’s own preferences and experience, there was some effort to cover a repertoire of basic communication needs as suggested in standard inventories such as Van Ek and Alexander’s Threshold Level Er.glish (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1975).
Each lesson has a uniform format consisting of five parts:
Conversation Variations Your Turn Sharing Try Your Hand
Following is a brief summary of the format and character of each section with a few suggestions for teaching strategies.
Conversation
The “Conversation" sections which open each lesson seek to be as authenticas possible, with no artificial language. A major problem confronting the author of a conversational textbeok is deciding which register to pitch the conversations at. While there are some examples of more formal English in many kinds of situations, including politeness language when talking to strangers, 1 have hoped to avoid the wooden quality that casts a pall of artificiality over so many textbooks which have the goal of teaching spoken English. Endeavoring to avoid cold and priggish textbook lan­guage that no native speakers in their right mind would ever utter,
1 have frequently included colloquial expressions such as “yeah,” “uh, huh,” “hmm,” “let's see," and many other such pause mark­ers and speech fillers. They remain opaque and lifeless on the page, of course, until the teacher models how they occur in an organic conversational and social context.
Also, though few textbooks ever take cognizance of it, English speakers quite frequently omit subject pronouns, par­ticularly “I.” Occasionally, I have tried to reflect this and other such elliptical tendencies in the conversations. If I have erred on the side of being too colloquial at times, I hope that teachers and students alike will find this transgression at least more desirable in the greater scheme of things than reinforcing the idea that spoken English is a robot-like language devoid of contractions, reduced forms, casual expressions, and—ultimately—bled dr)'of its lifeblood.