《新编大学英语》第二册电子教案2

Book II Unit 2 Communication Problems

Teaching Objectives:

In this unit students are required to:

1) get to know some useful information concerning the topic of the reading passages in this unit .

2) do some preparation activities such as discussion, group work, etc. to practice their spoken skill and

communicative skills;

3) grasp some new words and try to use these words which help them to enrich their vocabulary;

4) read the in-class reading passage in a limited time and grasp some expressions and grammatical points in

the in-class reading passage to improve their reading comprehension;

5) do some post-reading exercises and some after-class reading to practice what they have got to know in

class to improve their English comprehensive skills.;

6) translate some typical sentences into Chinese or English by using some expressions learned in the reading

passages to acquire some translating skills and better their translating abilities.

Student Level: Grade 2005 level 1 2005-2006 II term

Time allotment:

1st period 2nd period 3rd period 4th period 5th

period 6th

period 7th

period 8th

period

Part One:

Preparation:

1,2,3 Part Two:

In-class Reading:

1. Pre-Reading

2. Passage

reading(structure) In-class

Reading:

1.Passage

Reading (key

language

points)

2.Post-reading

(Discussion) Post-reading;

Check on Ss’

After-class

reading

(Text A) After-class

Reading（Text 2）

Part Three

Ex. 1.2.3 Part

Three

Ex.4.5

Part

Four:

Ex.2.3 View.

Listen

&speak:

Part I:

Ex.

1.2.3.4.5 View.

Listen

&speak:

Part II

Part III

Useful Information: (10MIN)

Learning a second language is never easy, and, generally speaking, the older one is when one attempts a

new language, the more difficult it becomes. This is at least partly due to what is known as language

interference, meaning that the linguistic patterns of our first language interfere with those of the second

because no two languages have exactly the same sounds and grammatical structures.

All languages have obligatory categories of grammar that may be lacking in other languages.

Russian---unlike English---has an obligatory category for gender which demands that a noun, and often a

pronoun, specify whether it is masculine, feminine, or neuter. Another obligatory category, similarly lacking

in English, requires a verb state indicating whether or not an action has been complicated. Therefore, a

Russian finds it impossible to translate accurately the English sentences “I hired a worker” without having

much more information. He would have to know whether the “I” was a man or woman, whether the action

had a completive or non-completive aspect ( “already hired” as opposed to “was in the process of hiring” ),

and whether the “worker” was a man or a woman.

Likewise, when translating an English story into Chinese in which a character identified as cousin appears,

a Chinese translator requires to know whether it refers to a male or a female, whether the character is older

or younger than the speaker, and whether the character belongs to the family of the speaker’s father or

mother. Therefore biaomei ( 表妹) can be translated into English only by the awkward statement “ a

female cousin on my mother’s side and younger than I ”. of course, the translator might simply establish

these facts about the character the first time she appears and thereafter translate the word as “cousin”, but

that would ignore the significance in Chinese culture of the repetition of these obligatory categories.

The Russian/English and Chinese/English examples illustrate the basic problem in any translation. No

matter how skilled translators are, they cannot take the language our of the speech community that uses it. Translation obviously is not a simple two-day street between two language. Rather, it is a busy intersection

at which at least five thoroughfares meet------the two languages with all of their peculiar characteristics, the

cultures of the two speech communities, and the speech situation in which the statement was uttered.

The English language has a very large vocabulary because it has incorporated words from many other

languages over the centuries. This is nowhere more apparent than in its color words. For example, there are

many words that express the color “purple”, describing its different shades and hues: mauve, violet, lilac, or

lavender. An interesting linguistic gender difference among native speakers of English is the likelihood of

women using these color terms to differentiate between shades of purple, whereas, men will be satisfied with

the one word “purple”. This is true of other color words too. Words like “beige”, “ecru”, “aquamarine”,