Next let's talk about when Chinese students reach the ideal level not the imaginarily-high level then at that time how large their vocabulary should be? Let's look at this picture which says that the requirement is like this I use the dark color to show the higgest level an exam requires and the light color to show the lower one we can see that the lowest level is about 4000 words Unfortunately, many people think that after taking CET4 their English is still insuffient they cannot make an academic speech they can not attend a job interview that is totally in English If they want to further their study abroad you have to attend those exams required as if you have never learned English before 4000 words is far from enough and it is not only about the vocabulary there are also many other problems As we have said before to truly master a language you have to be able to listen, speak, read and write it and reach a certain level The number of the active vocabulary according to my research over the past years I believe the appropriate number should be five thousand we need 5000 active words These words can actually help you resolve almost all the problems you meet in exams and in daily life In academic communication you may need a little bit more than 5000 About the 5000 words It contain many familiar ones and those that need you to put your heart in to it is surely less than 5000 We all know the word "and", right? So if we drop these familiar words we only need to learn by heart about 2000 to 3000 words Well, you know if we neglect all the English education we had before Can we remember 2000 to 3000 words Ok, let's set the goal in a higher level 3000 words in a short period of time? They need you to put all your energy in them Based on your exsiting English base you still need to learn 3000 new words make it clear when are they used how do we pronounce them When you are about to speak them You know their collocation and under what circumstances they are used When you hear them you can recoginze them and when you want to write them down they can instantly appear on the paper You can always speak them out whenever you want and use them on appropriate places The time and energy you need to achieve this seems to have nothing to do with our current system The other day, I heard a suprising story which is very funny and yet pretty reasonable An English teacher who becomes tired of the old teaching system so he began to teach a bunch of students English as in old times, in private After three years These students have already reached the level of CET4 all of them Only three years and those juniors reached such a level they have no trouble in passing CET4 This brings us to reconsider what makes it become a reality what are some influential aspects and back to our topic today When we are giving a presentation, a speech we need to consider how to do it beautifully About this topic What I am going to share is my sincere feelings and experiences First of all, I want to say that language study has to have a clear goal now for us, it is to speak well during our formal speech our presentation what we need to do is to imitate and to lear from those excellent speakers the top speakers of the world specifically speaking I mean those who are not professional speakings I don't recommend you to learn from them but from those who works in different walks of life those who comes from different countries We cannot only watch those native speakers that will urge you to pursue the perfect status of language Going on that road is not beneficial for us What we need is effective communication If we leran from a German to analyze how does he present a data how does he make things clear we might learn more On the platform of TED there are plenty of excellent speeches like this In the past few years and in the future when I am giving this MOOC related with speeches and presentations I am trying to and will continue to draw resources from TED because TED has made it clear that it aims to let people all over the world who are interested in learning gain new ideas from TED We can not only learn ideas from TED but also a kind of nutrition of the language In cooperation of listening to this course I hope that on the one hand I will share something according to my experience but I am aware that there are many things that can not be taught on classes I believe that if on class we want to finish learning 3000 and we learn at once 30 new words or even 100 new words then all of a sudden, our students would become old it is not suitable to do Those who actually have some thoughts and who are dedicated to doing something need to find some unique resources that is to say I am still planning about it that while our courses is playing on the Internet this book will come out I choose its name as that of our course, that is, Essential for English Speeches and Presentations And in the book, I will add 1500 words which are frequently used in speeches and presentations which can directly enhance your ability Why do I make the number as 1500 You know that VOA has tried before to use minimum vocabulary to tell American stories to the whole world to tell their culture and features and VOA created a system that is the special English program which is made up of only 1500 words it aims to tell all global things in these words Any sophisicated concept can be explained in simple words The 1500 words we need to remember is probably a little bit harder than that of the VOA but they have their roots they come from a large corpus of English speeches This is what I am talking about and what we are going to do Our work is based on data it is not randomly decided It is based on certain data that we draw these vocabulary our Let see what is the most influential most powerful words Certainly, what is unique about us is that meanwhile we are aware that on which aspects our Chinese students need to improve on How what we want to say is expressed by others in what kind of languages this answer lies in my book is what I need to do next Besides, I recommend those students who are English majors to do a hardwork You need to find some time to do this job to distinguish the fine shades among words Especially those words that you would be using frequently to those frequently-used words you need to tell their differencecs This is what I often did back when I was in the university when I was a freshman and sophomore majoring in technical English I did that pretty often and if you now need me to recommend you some tool books to read With all my observations over years I still think that this book is satisfactory its unique part is that this dictionary is actually compiled by some Chinese English-learning experts to distinguish one word from another You can see that this version is a a Chinese one because when you read the English version and try to understand things in English the differences between words those fine shades those tiny differences are hard to be noticed Once there were students who chose the English-version dictionary and when looking at the explaination they found that the differences between two words those fine shades between the two is still not that clear thus it became pointless to read the English one I really think this dictionary is a good one if you have got time, check it out by yourself it may take a long time but you will see that about any concept it will be compared with at least seven or eight sometimes even more than ten words their tiny differences are listed one by one Hard work but for ambitious English learner you can do this There is one more entertaining way Situational comedies We all like to watch them Of course, in old times Chinese students like to watch Friends most This TV Series is rather beneficial for daily communication but as you know many spoken language what we use in our daily life is unsuitable to be used in speeches or presentations Under these formal conditions we need to use words as those that are presented on the court those precise languages we need them to debate moreover, their customers pay them by hour which requires their language to be more precise and powerful I recommend two situation comedies for you to choose from The first one would be Boston Legal Its Chinese name is Up to now it has all been finished filming all together six seasons It is nice to watch an excellent TV Series which has already had an ending Another one would be a little bit old, that is The Practice These are super good What do we need to learn from it? During the court debate How they can express those concepts that is related with all walks of life those differences between various ideas and cultures and many other stuff in a precise way This is what we need to learn what we need to put efforts on I believe to many students particularly, those interested in this course In fact, like some of my former students who I taught about Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation they are my MTI students While giving certain classes the most difficult part for them is by using the language similiar to the court ones to do interpretation This is actually for an English major the most challenging task for us, the common English-learners we don't have to do this but we surely can learn a lot from it What is the best part? that is to say, nowadays we can see the most vivid expression in them is when they are debating with each other we can definitely learn a lot from that
