A Study Of Immersion Instruction To Improve The Listening And Speaking Ability Of Junior Middle School Students

The immersion instruction as one of the teaching methods of the Second Language Acquisition has been researched and applied in philological and pedagogical area abroad deeply and widely. A large number of findings show that the level of EFL learners’ listening and speaking competences are much lower than that of native speakers. Although immersion instruction has been proved to be beneficial to learners in many findings abroad, yet there are not many studies focusing on the effects of immersion instruction on listening comprehension and oral expression in junior students in China.This study investigates the effects of immersion instruction on junior students’ listening comprehension and oral expression. In the study, two parallel classes were assigned randomly as the experimental class (EC) and the control class (CC). Each class received (a) a listening comprehension pretest,(b) an oral pretest,(c)2different types of instruction-translation instruction and immersion instruction,(d)4listening comprehension tests, and (e)1oral test (based on oral pretest, each for4-week delayed). The experiment was conducted in two phases. In Phase1, EC received immersion instruction and CC received translation instruction. In order to examine the reliability of the experiment, in Phase2, the position of EC and CC were reversed. In other words, EC in Phase1turned out to be CC in Phase2, and CC to be EC. The new EC and CC in Phase2repeated the steps in Phase1when learning new words.The study findings show that immersion instruction facilitates the students to improve their performance in listening comprehension and also the effects of immersion instruction on oral expression are significant. However, some oral mistakes were found significantly. Pedagogical implications were illustrated accordingly.