| Oral fluency is an important characteristic of one's speaking competence. This study is conducted to examine the development of Chinese college students'EFL oral fluency under the communicative language teaching mode in multimedia environment. It aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching methodology adopted in this study on helping students gain oral fluency. The definition, measurement, and models explaining oral fluency were reviewed; the specific communicative language teaching mode assisted by multimedia was illustrated; previous studies related to oral fluency were sketched.The study was based on an English audio-video speaking course (EAVSC), called Situational English course, targeted at non-English major juniors at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. The teaching methodology was framed by Bachmann's Communicative Language Ability (CLA) theory, which emphasized students'maximal practice of the target language in authentic or nearly authentic situations. Various formats of in-class activities were contained in this course: pair-work dialogues, three-person group discussions, debates, one-minute personal statements and so forth. The class was conducted in a language lab, in which a digital learning system, WE-LL 6000 was installed in each student's computer as well as the teacher's. Under this learning system, students can easily be put into different pairs or groups either randomly or in set rules when finishing tasks, without changing their seats at all. The teacher can also record students'oral productions simultaneously, which enables the teacher to track students'gradual development on the one hand and serve as data collection for research purpose on the other hand.The research was designed to answer the following questions:(1) Does the Communicative Teaching Mode Assisted by Multimedia play a significant role in improving students'oral fluency after a semester's learning and practice in Situational English classes?(2) If subjects do show development in their oral fluency, which aspects related to oral fluency are the most remarkable ones? And which are the not so significant ones?(3) What other findings could be generalized from the study?(4) What implications does this study show on the teaching of oral English in question and what further suggestions can be summarized to the macro teaching of oral English in China?Twenty-four subjects were randomly selected from two independent classes attending Situation English course taught by the same instructor. In this study, the author chose the one-minute personal statement as the means to elicit subjects'speech in the pretest and in the posttest. The data was collected with the help of the WE-LL 6000 system, and processed by Cool Edit Pro 2.0 and Microsoft Word 2007. The raw data were further computed by SPSS 17.0. Temporal indices, performance indices, and linguistic indices were used to describe the subjects'English oral fluency development. A series of pair-samples t-tests were carried out to see whether there were significant differences between subject's speeches between the two tests.The main findings of the research include:(1) In general, subjects'oral fluency improved after being taught by the communicative language teaching mode assisted by multimedia.(2) In terms of temporal indices, after a semester's learning and practice in this EAVSC, students did show progress in Speech Rate (SR), Articulation Rate (AR), Phonation/time Ratio (PTR), Mean Length Run (MLR), and Average Length of Pause (ALP). Subject's improvements in PTR and ALP were significant at the confidence level of 0.05; their growth in MLR was significant at the confidence level of 0.10; their progress in SR and AR was not significant. The change of standard deviations in the five indices showed that students'development exhibit a central tendency in SR, ALP, and PTR; in AR and MLR, however, they presented more individual characteristics.(3) As for performance indices, subjects'repairs per 100 syllables dropped slightly, indicating that they were more confident in speaking in the posttest compared with in the pretest. Of the ratio of repairs, they spent more time on reformulations and replacements, while ratio of pruned length to total length in their oral productions dropped at various degrees in the posttest. None of the differences in the three performance indices was significant.(4) The author borrowed Readability to measure the acceptability of subjects'oral productions in the two tests. Although data showed that students'speeches were more acceptable by the hearer, the t value suggested that this progress was not so significant. Whether this index would be accepted by other scholars remained unsolved and issues concerning how to improve linguistic index need to be explored in the future.(5) Since the subjects were selected from two independent classes, the author did paired samples t-tests over the two classes using the same three types of indices. At the confidence level of 0.05 (the degree of freedom is 11), the subjects from Class A showed significant progress in SR, PTR, MLR and ALP, while in Class B, none of the nine indices showed any significant progress. Therefore, there was a great discrepancy between the two classes' oral fluency development in this study.Based on the results achieved in this research, the author put forward the following suggestions in the teaching of oral English:(1) Whichever teaching methodology an English teacher may adopt in his/her class, sufficient various in-class activities should be included to allow the students practice oral English as much and often as possible.(2) It would be helpful for students'language exchange process if communicative strategies were systematically trained in class. (3) The teacher should make full use of the modern technology to assist the learning and teaching of oral English.(4) For the students, they are encouraged to master as many lexical phrases/chunks or formulaic sequences so as to speak the foreign language fluently.The innovation of this study lies in three aspects:investigating the oral fluency development from the perspective of transforming the teaching methodology and making full use of multimedia; using one-minute personal statement as the format of oral production elicitation, which is a group discussion/debated based method; borrowing a measuring instrument in the area of writing, readability, to serve as the linguistic index in subjects'oral productions.With examining the teaching effectiveness of the EAVSC in question and provide according feedback as the primary purpose, this study is also expected to enrich the research of English oral fluency in China as well as serve as a reference for peers both in the field of both oral and written English teaching.
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