An Experimental Research On Promoting Primary School Students' Oral English Competence Through Text-based Drama Performance

With the development of the society,English plays an increasingly more important role in Education.Through the efforts on English teaching over the past decades,primary school students' language knowledge and language skills have been improved gradually and continuously.However,there is a big gap between primary school students' oral English competence and our teaching goals due to subjective and objective reasons.For instance,most English teachers pay little attention to students' oral English competence in primary schools,while students lack interest and confidence to speak in front of others.This study attempts to apply text-based drama performance on the basis of frame theory to oral English teaching.Frame Theory indicates that comprehending to any word or concept would certainly activate a whole set of relative frame elements.Frames are specific unified frameworks of knowledge,or coherent schematizations of experience,and when one of the things in such a structure is introduced into a text,or into a conversation,all of the others are automatically made available.Based on the present situation of oral English teaching in primary schools,this study aims to explore whether frame-theory-based drama performance can improve primary school students' oral English competence or not.And it aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)Can text-based drama performance promote primary school students' oral English accuracy?(2)Can text-based drama performance promote primary school students' oral English fluency?(3)Can text-based drama performance promote primary school students' oral English completeness?A twelve weeks' teaching experiment has been conducted with the application of frame-theory-based drama performance in the experimental group with 44 students.Another class with 44 students at the same level of English accuracy,fluency and completeness is the control group.And teacher applied frame-theory-based drama performance in experimental class while the text-construction on the basis of PPP(Presentation,Practice and Production)in control class,which is an advanced teaching method these years.Instruments applied in this study are mainly pre-test,mid-test,post-test and interview.The pre-test aims to test whether there is a significant difference on students' oral English competence between experimental class and control class,and the post-test tries to investigate whether the new teaching method works or not,and the mid-test tries to provide with more evidence.The comparison and analysis of data between the pre-test,mid-test and post-test from two groups show that oral English competence of the experimental group has been promoted quite a lot,and scores in EC are higher than those of CC,which proves that the frame-theory-based drama performance is effective in promoting primary school students' oral English competence for it helps to activate students' frame elements effectively.The experimental results show that the frame-theory-based drama performance is feasible for oral English teaching in primary schools.