Environmental/Affective Factors To Consider--An Empiricla Study Of Non-English Majors' Oral English Output

The present study intends to investigate the factors affecting Chinese college non-English majors' oral English output from the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects, in another word, the environmental factors and affective factors influencing college English learners' oral English output in college English teaching and learning settings. The investigation was guided by the following research questions:1. What is the theoretical basis for oral English output?2. What environmental and personal factors influence students' oral Englishoutput?3. What are the correlations among these factors?4. Which factor has stronger influence on students' oral English?5. How do environmental factors affect classroom teaching and learning of oral English and oral practice after class?6. How do affective factors affect students' classroom participation and oral English practice outside class?The study explored the environmental and affective factors, which may facilitate or debilitate students' oral English output in college English teaching and learning settings. Altogether 305 sophomores from five different majors in Shaanxi Institute of Technology as well as the five teachers participated in the research, 50 out of whom were chosen at random (one class for 10) to investigate their perspectives from the questionnaire; then according to their majors, they were divided into ten groups, each of whose average scores were given from the foreign language teacher's oral classes. These data, along with the results from the questionnaire, were analyzed on the basis of ANOVA and regression analysis. Classroom observation lasted for a whole semester to get the general descriptions of teachers' management and students' activities in class. Ten students were interviewed to get their general ideas about teachers' teaching and their experience of learning oral English both in and after class. The five teachers were also interviewed to get their views of points about their students, the teaching syllabus, and materials. The results showed that because of the poor classroom management fororal English practice, the lopsided understanding of the teaching syllabus, unbalanced input and output, students' fear of making mistakes, their introverted personality, as well as their rare practice after class, non-English majors experienced an unbalanced development of EFL skills-they have a poor oral English ability, although most of them desire to learn and grasp oral English proficiency. Based on the findings, recommendations for more productive and humanistic teaching and educational design and practice were provided for EFL instructors and learners in China.