A Study On Improving The Oral English Of Vocational School Students Through English Movies

With the rapid development of economy and IT industry,the relationship between English movie and English teaching has aroused increasing attention of English teachers and learners in China.However,this has not resulted in a stream of researches in China suggesting ways in which language teachers could exploit their potentials,especially in middle schools and secondary vocational schools. This thesis is a research on the effects of teaching oral English through movies. The study is conducted in the hope that it may be of some help to find out some effective and practical ways for English teachers to use English movies as the language materials in teaching oral English.In the thesis,the author first briefly introduces theories supporting the idea of teaching oral English through movies and presents the advantages of movies as the main carrier of language materials for oral English and the principles for selecting movies.This study is an experimental study.Two groups of 84 students were chosen as subjects of the study,42 in the experimental group and 42 in the control group.The difference lied in that the experimental group had an oral English class employing movies as the main carrier of language materials,while the control group using the traditional textbook-based language materials.Due to the advantages of movies as the carrier of language materials,various activities for the experimental group were designed to get students involved in the language learning process.For the control group,the language learning activities listed in the textbook were conducted in the classroom.The data were collected through three questionnaires,a pretest and a posttest of oral English.And the data of the pretest and posttest were processed by the software SPSS.The results of the study show that movies as the carrier of learning materials can better motivate students in the oral English class than the traditional textbook-based language materials.Students instructed with language materials from movies performed better in the posttest of oral English.Moreover,most students in the experimental group held positive attitudes towards teaching oral English through movies.The thesis ends by pointing out the limitations of the study.And suggestions are made for the further study in this area.