An Investigation On Oral English Accuracy Development And Its Relationship With Oral English Quality Of High School Students

Oral proficiency of Chinese learners is not satisfactory.Therefore,researchers have conducted a large number of studies on the development of oral production.However,few studies focus on the accuracy of students’ oral English.In order to fill the gap,the present study aims to investigate the development trend of high school students’ oral accuracy with the corpus analysis for an overall picture,and its relationship with oral English quality.The corpus was collected from an oral test of a native English speaker and 36 senior high school students from three ordinary classes,among which 12 were senior one,12 were senior two,and 12 were senior three.The participants were rigorously chosen from three natural classes of a key senior high school in Nanchang.The test paper was designed according to the oral test of college entrance exam.Corpus analysis was conducted through indices of phonological accuracy and morphosyntactic accuracy.Phonological accuracy was divided into segmental accuracy and supra-segmental accuracy.Segmental accuracy was measured by the percentage of consonants correct(PCC),percentage of vowels correct(PVC)and the number of addition and deletion of phonemes.Supra-segmental accuracy refers to intonation accuracy in this paper,which was analyzed by qualitative research method.Morphosyntactic accuracy was measured by Error-free T-units per T-unit(EFT/T): The total number of error-free T-units divided by the total number of T-units.Transcription and calculation work were completed by three postgraduates to make sure the reliability of the data.Finally,SPSS 20.0 was utilized for the results of quantitative analysis.The major findings are as follows:1)The results of phonological accuracy show that students have made significant progress after three years of study,demonstrating the upward trend in students’ phonological accuracy development.The main reasons are the extra pedagogic intervention and the effect of oral English test of college entrance examination.2)The results of morphosyntactic accuracy show that students have made great progress after three years of learning,illustrating the upward trend in students’ morphosyntactic accuracy development.The main reasons are the function of monitoring and the focus of teachers and students upon the morphosyntactic accuracy.3)Phonological accuracy was positively correlated with the oral English quality of the participants(PVC: r=.698 P=.000;PCC: r=.451 P=.006).Phonology is an essential component of oral English quality and accounts for a large proportion in the rating criteria of oral English test.The rating criteria of oral English test requires the standard pronunciation and natural intonation.Any participant in oral English test who has incorrect pronunciation or is not sensitive enough to intonation changes will lead to misunderstanding and poor performance.In this sense,poor phonological accuracy causes low scores of oral test.Morphosyntactic accuracy was positively correlated with the oral English quality of the participants(r=.371,P=.026).The rating criteria of oral English test requires the correct use of vocabulary and sentence patterns.Therefore,morphosyntactic ability is of great importance of oral production and directly affects the oral English quality.Implications for oral English teaching are as follows:Teachers should integrate the phonological accuracy with oral communication and focus more on segmental and suprasegmental accuracy.Besides,teachers should balance the development of phonological accuracy and morphosyntactic accuracy.Teachers need to cultivate students the capacity of producing longer stretch of discourse and guide students to pay attention to the match between form and meaning and to improve the accuracy of students’ language use.