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新视野研究生英语读说写2

英语原文加翻译

1 大学课堂：还有人在听吗？

A former teacher of mine, Robert A. Fowkes of New York University, likes to tell the story of a class he took in Old Welsh while studying in Germany during the 1930s. On the first day the professor strode up to the podium shuffled his notes, coughed, and began, ― Guten Tag, Meine Damen und Herren‖(―Good day, ladies and

gentlemen‖). Fowkes glanced around uneasily. He was the only student in the course. 纽约大学的Robert A Fowkes是我过去的一位老师。他喜欢讲在上世纪30年代他 在德国上，古威尔士语课的故事。第一天上课，教授大步走上讲台，翻了翻笔记，咳嗽了一声，开始说道：“早上好，女士们、先生们。”Fowkes不安地扫视一番。他是上这门课的唯一学生。

Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fell ill and missed a class. When he returned, the professor nodded vaguely and, to Fowkes‘s astonishment, began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lectured to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible.

在学期中间，Fowkes 因病缺了一次课。他回到课堂的时候，教授毫无表情地向他点了点头。接着令Fowkes大吃一惊的是，教授并没有按照顺序讲下一课，而是讲了后面一课。难道他真的在他唯一的学生缺席的情况下对着空教室讲了一课？Fowkes认为这太有可能了。

Today American colleges and universities (originally modeled on German ones) are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and students are not doing a good job of learning. American businesses and industries suffer from unenterprising, uncreative executives educated not to think for themselves but to mouth outdated truisms the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse.

今天美国的大学（原本是以德国的大学为模型的）受到了各方面的严厉指责。人们指责老师没有教好，学生没有学好。美国的商业和工业饱受无进取心的、缺乏创造力的管理人员之苦，这些人受的教育是自己不用思考，而是说一些过时的、在世界上其他地方早已抛弃的陈词滥调。大学毕业生即没有基本技能也没有全面修养。有人对高等教育的状况做了研究并发表了报告，但由此引发的变化很大程度上不是表面的，就是使已经糟糕的情形变得更糟。

One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work.

美国教育中很少被挑战的方面是讲课制度。教授不停地讲，学生不停地记笔记，就想十三世纪时的情形一样，那时因为课本缺乏又昂贵，很少有学生买得起。

我们早就该舍弃讲课制度，开始使用真正有用的方法。

Some days Mary sits in the front row, from where she can watch the professor read from a stack of yellowed notes that seem nearly as old as he is. She is bored by the lectures, and so are most of the other students, to judge by the way they are nodding off or doodling in their notebooks. Gradually she realizes the professor is as bored as his audience. At the end of each lecture he asks, ―Are there any questions?‖ in a tone of voice that makes it plain he would much rather there weren‘t. He needn‘t worry—the students are as relieved as he is that the class is over.

有几天玛丽坐在前排，她可以看到教授在读一叠几乎和他年纪一样老的发黄的讲义。她听课听烦了，其他大部分同学也听烦了，这从他们的行为中可以做出判断：他们要么在打盹，要么在笔记本上涂鸦。渐渐地她意识到教授和他的听众一样感到无聊。每次课结束时他都问道：“有问题吗？”他的语气明显表明他更希望没有问题。他不必担心，学生和他一样感到下课是一种解脱。

Mary knows very well she should read an assignment before every lecture. However, as the professor gives no quizzes and asks no questions, she soon realizes she needn‘t prepare. At the end of term she catches up by skimming her notes and memorizing a list of facts and dates. After the final exam, she promptly forgets much of what she has memorized. Some of her follow students, disappointed at the impersonality of it all, drop out of college altogether. Others, like Mary , stick it out, grow resigned to the system and await better days when, as juniors and seniors, they will attend smaller classes and at last get the kind of personal attention real learning requires.

玛丽清楚的知道她应该在每次上课前阅读布置的作业。但是，因为教授不做小测验也不提问，她很快就认识到她不必准备。学期末她只要看看笔记，再记记一些事件、年代就可以跟上进度。期末考试后她会立刻忘掉她背下来的大部分内容。她的有些同学对这种无人情味的学习很失望，干脆辍学。其他人像玛丽一样坚持下来，无奈地接受了这种制度，等待着到大三大四时的好日子，那时他们就会有较小的班级，最终也会得到真正的学习所需要的那种针对个人的关注。

I admit this picture is overdrawn—most universities supplement lecture courses with discussion groups, usually led by graduate students; and some classes such as first-year English and always relatively small. Nevertheless, far too many courses rely principally or entirely on lectures, an arrangement much loved by faculty and administrators but scarcely designed to benefit the students.

我承认上面的描述言过其实。大多数大学有讨论课来补充听力课，通常讨论课是由研究生主持的。而且有些班级，如一年级的英语课，也总是相对较小的。但是，还有太多的课主要或者完全依赖于讲课，这种安排受到教师和管理人员的青睐，但绝不是为学生的利益而设计的。

One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter become clear to them. Even simply paying attention is very difficult; people can listen at a rate of four hundred to

six hundred words a minute, while the most impassioned professor talks at scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, out their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think.

听课存在的一个问题是：会听是件很难的事。阅读课本中的相同内容是更有效的学习方法，因为学生可以根据其需要慢慢阅读直到他们理解这些内容，甚至仅仅做到专心听课都很难。人听的速度可以达到每分钟400---600个词，而最富有激情的教授说话的速度也很难达到这个速度的1/3。讲课和理解之间的时间差异导致开小差。很多学生认为多年来看电视已经削弱了他们保持注意力的能力。但是他们真正的问题是专心听课比他们认为的要难得多。

Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and them have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While it‘s true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker‘s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word.

更糟的是，听课是被动学习，至少对没有经验的听众如此。主动学习时学生些文章或做实验，然后由教师评价他们的作业，因此主动学习对那些还没有完全学会如何学习的学生来说益处要大得多。的确，积极听讲的技巧，如设法预测说话人的下一个要点或有选择的记笔记，能够提高听课的价值，但是很少有学生在大学学习的开始阶段就已经掌握了这些技巧。更为常见的是学生试图写下所有的内容，甚至还带着录音机去听课，以这种笨拙的方式来记录每个词。

Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by scribbling down a professor‘s often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. They need small discussion classes that demand the common labors of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however learned, propounds his or her own ideas.

学生需要向教授提问，也需要别人重视他们的想法。只有这样他们才能开发出聪明的、创造性的思考所必需的分析能力。大多数学生通过参加频繁的、甚至激烈的辩论才会学的更好，而不是通过胡乱记下教授对复杂事件所作出的常常不能令人满意的总结，他们需要小型讨论课，这种课需要教师和学生的共同努力，他们不需要那种让一个人提出自己观点的课堂，无论这个人多么有学识。

The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. Questions that require the