An Empirical Study On Communicative Strategy In Teaching College Oral English

The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to develop students' communicative competence, as an important component of communicative competence, fostering strategic competence should be one of the goals in FLT, especially in oral English teaching. However, present communicative strategic competence training focuses on only implicit training, and most communicative strategies are embedded in the textbooks as auxiliary exercise. Furthermore, to some extent the students' awareness on communicative strategies is weak, they have no overall concept on it, and the method on the usage of communication strategy is dull hinders the development of communicative strategic competence.Based on communicative strategy theories, using the method of questionnaires and oral test, the researcher did a quantitative study on 89 non-English-major students in Shanxi Medical University about their recognition and using frequency on communicative strategies, and about relationship between strategy training and communicative competence. Results of this study partially give support and verification to the hypothesis that classroom training of communicative strategies is of effectiveness. The major finding of the study as the following aspect: (1) Most of students are aware the great importance of the communicative strategies in language learning after training. The CSs training promote the"frequency"of student's use the strategies. (2) The employment of CSs is related with one's personality. Extroverted students are more willing to employ achievement CSs and they more frequently employ CSs to solve communicative problems than introverted learners; CSs employment is also related with learner's English proficiency. Learners with higher oral English proficiency tend to use achievement, analytic, conceptual and retrieval strategies more frequently, but those with lower oral English proficiency are more likely to employ code strategies and reduction strategies. This result supports and verifies the hypothesis the higher frequency of communicative strategies employed by learners of higher English proficiency.Results of oral test partially give support and verification to the hypothesis that strengthen the training of"avoidance/replacement strategies","circumlocution strategies", and"stalling device strategies"training in FLT classroom could be able to increase the"accuracy"of student's oral English; Strengthen"stalling device strategies"training in FLT classroom could promote the"frequency"of student's use the strategies in oral English. But Strengthen"circumlocution strategies"training in FLT classroom could not increase the"frequency"of student's use the strategies. Strengthen CSs training such as"avoidance/replacement strategies","stalling device strategies","circumlocution strategies"make the students oral English more fluency in communicating. Experimental group acquires a great improvement on speech speed in both tests, p<.001. But no difference is found between independent-sample t-tests of two groups, p>.05, which indicates that CSs training has an unobvious direct effect on improvement of students'oral fluency.Com-summarized the research results and implications, the researcher finally puts forward some suggestions based on oral English teaching. Hope to give some help on future communicative strategies teaching, but also hope to help the majority of learners'mastering communicative strategic competence and improve their comprehensive communication level.