Exploration And Practice Of Tour-guide English Teaching In Vocational Schools

Any language is inseparable from culture,language is culture,and language teaching is a kind of cultural teaching.In this respect,tour-guide English teaching is essentially a process of helping students to leap from Chinese language and culture to English language and culture,which is a study on how to acquire intercultural communication competence.The misunderstanding of traditional foreign language teaching often separates the relationship between language and culture,which makes the teachers only use language as a tool in tour-guide English teaching,simply and mechanically let students learn and repeat vocabulary,phonetic symbols,grammar,sentences and other related knowledge.Students accumulate a large number of English symbols in rote memorization,but they can not use them in practice.In addition,the particularity of tour-guide English makes it pay more attention to the importance of cultural participation than general English teaching.Students should not only learn authentic English expression,but also master the way to tell "Chinese story" with true feelings in accordance with the habit of English expression,which is the key to the success of tour-guide English teaching.Professor Galal Walker,an American sinologist,based on the profound understanding of Wang Yangming’s theory of "integration of knowledge and action",has created the teaching method of "performed culture",which is a culture-oriented language teaching method.In this teaching method,language learning is a process of "Doing is knowing".Teachers need to construct a specific situation and put culture into the root of language learning from the very beginning.While students play different cultural roles to deduce specific "cultural events",in the repeated exchanges and interactions,gradually accumulate the corresponding language and cultural knowledge,and overcome the barriers from mother tongue culture to non-native culture.This kind of language learning based on cultural understanding has effectively solved a series of problems in American Chinese teaching.Since it was put forward,it has been promoted as the flagship project of the United States Department of State and has trained a number of outstanding professionals in cross-cultural communication.In recent ten years,in order to promote the development of foreign language teaching,some colleges and universities in China have also introduced this teaching method,and have made great progress in the continuous practice and exploration.Based on this,the author attempts to take the relevant theories of "performed culture" teaching method as the basis,combined with the empirical research of tour-guide English classroom teaching,which is undoubtedly a new breakthrough and challenge.Combined with the specific case of tour-guide English teaching,this thesis mainly discusses the following aspects:In theory,based on the interpretation of Wang Yangming’s "integration of knowledge and action",it is believed that the basic goal of tour-guide English learning is to enable learners to have the ability to "acquire".In this process,"culture" and "physical performance" play a vital role.At the same time,the study of language should proceed from the cultural meaning and break the traditional teaching mode by changing the roles of teachers and students,so that students can use stories as the basic unit of memory in interactive communication,play a specific role at specific time and place thus to deduce certain events,and loop forever,ultimately form language and culture memory related to tour-guide English.In view of method,as a kind of cross-cultural education,tour-guide English emphasizes the formation of specific cultural perception in dynamic learning,and all teaching behaviors should be carried out around "culture" and "physical performance".And "integration of knowledge and action" should run through the whole process of English teaching from the beginning to the end.Under the guidance of the teaching strategy,the author divides the tour-guide English course into two basic types: interpretation and exercise.From the aspects of strangeness to familiarity,imitating to thinking,cognition to acquisition,training and strengthening,application and development,and cultural penetration,this paper discusses the concrete implementation methods of the teaching method of "performed culture" in tour-guide English classroom thus to let the students acquire the ability to use authentic English to tell the native culture in the process.Empirically,taking an old man in Anshun-Tunpu culture as an example,it conducts empirical analysis and research on the "performed culture” of tour-guide English.In the stage of teaching preparation,the author designs the tour-guide English teaching from five aspects: the formulation of teaching contents,the analysis of teaching objects,the setting of teaching objectives,the adoption of teaching methods and the compilation of teaching schemes.In the implementation stage,the author discusses the concrete implementation steps of Tunpu culture teaching in details,and evaluates and makes timely feedback on the students’ learning effect according to the Performance Standard of Tour-guide English Level-4 Rating System.It has been proved by practice that the teaching method of "performed culture" created by Professor Galal Walker is very effective in the teaching of tour-guide English in vocational school.In this way,students’ English ability is generally improved,and the initiative of English learning is greatly enhanced.It is worth further exploring and studying in the future study and work.