An Investigation Of Factors Affecting Oral Fluency In The EFL Classroom Environment

In recent years, teachers of English in colleges and universities in China have realized the importance of improving students' oral fluency. They have made great efforts and employed various methods in an attempt to make some progress in this respect. However, oral fluency still remains one of the most difficult skills to master for most students. This makes it very necessary to identify those factors that have greater predicting power for oral fluency. The discovery of these factors will lay a solid foundation for the improvement of later English teaching. Some teachers think that they know some factors related to oral fluency like practice, motivation and so on. However, on many occasions, their knowledge of these factors is based on their teaching experience or on their subjective judgments. Whether and how these factors are related to oral fluency has not been confirmed by way of quantitative analysis. One of the reasons for the lack of empirical studies on those factors is that there is no appropriate instrument to measure them.By way of the literature review, the researcher knows that the EFL classroom environment has a great effect on oral fluency. This study is intended to investigate the relationship between the EFL classroom environment and oral fluency. This paper reports the findings of a study of the influence of the English classroom environment on oral fluency among 285 freshmen from six classes at Shandong Normal University using the modified version of the CUCEI. The data were analyzed to determine the validity and reliability of the modified CUCEI questionnaire, in terms of its factor structure, internal consistency reliability, discriminant ability and the ability to differentiate between different classroom environments. As a result, the modified CUCEI has proved to be a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the EFL classroom environment. The results of t-tests show that female students perceive the overall classroom environment more positively than do male students. It is also found that female students perceive more innovation, cooperation and task orientation thando male students. The results of one-way ANOVA show that all the scales except equity and individualization are able to differentiate different classroom environments. As for the relationship between the classroom environment factors and oral fluency, the results indicate a statistically significant association between personalization, equity, task orientation and oral fluency. The results of multiple regression analysis indicate that only the scale of personalization accounts for a statistically significant amount of variance in oral fluency. The results suggest that teachers wishing to improve students' oral fluency should pay more attention to personalization in English class. The findings from the interviews provide some suggestions on how to strengthen interactions and provide various kinds of support for the individual students.This research is significant in the following aspects: First, it is one of the few studies using the modified CUCEI to investigate the relationship between the EFL classroom environment and oral fluency. Second, the study helps to find out some shortcomings of this questionnaire and propose some suggestions on how to improve it. Third, the classroom environment is very complicated and it includes many factors that are likely to correlate with oral fluency. The study helps to identify some of the specific factors that have proved to correlate with oral fluency through quantitative analysis of the classroom environment. Fourth, the study also helps teachers of English to improve the classroom environment in order to make it helpful to the improvement of students' oral fluency.