A Correlation Study On Of Speaking Self-Concept And Oral Expression Of Undergraduate English Majors

Self-concept is a person’s perceptions of himself / herself, which are formed in the process of one’s experiences and interpretations of one’s environment. They are especially influenced by evaluations of significant others, reinforcements, and attributions for one’s own behavior. It is a multidimensional and hierarchical construct.Speaking self-concept is a branch of English self-concept, referring to English learners’ description and evaluation of their oral English proficiency and oral expression ability. Oral expression which equals to utterance to some extent can be produced from input and output during the interaction process in English speaking context. And it is not only the production of second language, but also the effective impulsion to acquire second language. Oral expression can be assessed by complexity,accuracy and fluency. Although there are numerous research on self-concept and oral expression respectively, very few researchers have set their foot into the combination of speaking self-concept and oral expression. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a correlation study on speaking self-concept and oral expression so as to enrich the research in this field.The present study focuses on undergraduate English majors’ speaking self-concept and their oral expression and tends to find out:(1) the general picture of undergraduate English majors’ speaking self-concept;(2) the relationship between English majors’ speaking self-concept and their oral expression in general and its three dimensions: complexity, accuracy and fluency;(3) the differences between students with more positive and those with less positive speaking self-concept in the oral English task.The participants were 36 undergraduate English majors, randomly selected from2 natural classes from the Foreign Languages College of Jiangxi Normal University.The instruments used in the current study include the speaking self-concept questionnaire and an oral English test. All the valid data were input into SPSS 16.0 for further analysis to figure out descriptive statistics, and correlation analysis and independent T-test.The major findings can be concluded as follows:Firstly, the undergraduate English majors generally hold a positive speaking self-concept, and they are satisfied with their oral English on the whole. That is to say,most undergraduate English majors’ self-description and self-evaluation of their oral English achievement is relatively good.Secondly, there is strong significant correlation between speaking self-concept of undergraduate English majors and their oral expression in general. It implies that those students who hold positive speaking self-concept do better in oral expression than those who has negative speaking self-concept.Thirdly, speaking self-concept is significantly correlated with fluency, suggesting that undergraduate English majors’ positive speaking self-concept will lead to their better fluency in delivering ideas. But there is no correlation between speaking self-concept and accuracy and complexity, including syntactic complexity and lexical complexity. That is to say, how a student perceives his or her oral English ability will have little influences on oral accuracy and complexity.Fourthly, significant difference exists between subjects with more positive and with less positive speaking self-concept in terms of fluency, but there are no obvious differences between them in accuracy, syntactic complexity and lexical complexity. In other words, the more positive the speaking self-concept is, the more fluent the speech produced by language learners is. However, it is not applicable to the aspects of accuracy and complexity.According to the research results, the present study offers some pedagogical implications for oral English teachers and English majors. The teachers need to create a free context for students to talk and design some oral English tasks with different levels of difficulty. The students are required to raise the awareness of speaking self-concept and are adept at seizing chances to perform in class and in daily life. At the same time, some limitations of the study and suggestions to future research are pointed out.