People say, learning a foreign language well is a thing of one's life time. But people still tend to get better education in college so that they'll become more professional and competitive after graduation.

However, it seems the current college English education is not so satisfactory. Teachers feel extremely difficult to motivate and inspire students to speak English up while most of them remain silent in class. Why don't they open their mouths and speak? Is there anything easier than to open the mouth? Surely, according to those students in college, sometimes they are lazy, but most importantly they don't have any interest in the textbooks they are reading. The content id either obsolete or too unattractive. They feel reluctant to take a glance at them.

So here comes the first problem: the textbooks are too outdated. Lots of college students just skip oral English classes and go to watch hot American TV series like LOST.

Well, the second problem lies in the educational system. Nowadays students can not graduate from college if they fail to pass CET-4 or CET-6. Inevitably, this has put more pressure on the students who have been worried about their English study. Actually, they have just begun to learn English with interest.. Now they might feel pushy and stressful by the exams.

last but not the least, teachers in college should shoulder the responsibility of educating their students. It's far from enough to tell us the knowledge points about grammar. Especially when some English teachers write down every detail about a word's definition on their own books and read them aloud in class, students believe it's nothing but a waste of time. Don't we know how to look up a work in the dictionary?

Good teachers know all through those years of English study, students are forced to do better in reading and writing. Nobody really cares what you listen to or what you say. Now we're asked to listen more and speak more so that we may express ourselves in a more accurate and profound way. Therefore these teachers are doing their best to draw the attention of their students to how to make a better presentation step by step.

Problems can fall into all kinds of categories. The question is how to solve them properly. On the one hand, students should know what they are capable of and make their focus on listening and speaking on the basis of well-round developing. On the other hand, the schools and related authorities should take some effective measures to change the old pattern of teaching and studying so that the process will be interactive and enjoyable.

作者：刘伟  天津外国语学院