Activating Students' Speaking Potential In Class

In this thesis the author analyzes the fact that college students are poor in spoken English and tries to seek out the reasons under the phenomena of "dumb English" and "low-efficiency". EFL in China has been shifting to ESL and the society makes a demand of qualified English speakers but traditional TEFL cannot meet the demand. The author focuses on learner anxiety, teacher's talk and pre-communicative activities to develop students' speaking ability. The effectiveness of activating students' speaking potential is analyzed in theory as well as in action research.The first chapter is Introduction. The author talks about the background of this dissertation, advantages of speaking English and the challenges the language training schools pose. Relevant studies are summarized too.In the second chapter the author analyzes the factors affecting students' speaking English in traditional education, cultural influence, and academic abilities of teachers. The situations in China are conducive to giving students' oral English development as a priority in teaching.The third chapter is about the conditioned relationship between TTT and STT. The author suggests that reducing TTT can lower students' anxiety and guarantee students input of class imitation and effective practice.The fourth chapter is the application of pre-communicative activities in class. Activating students' prior knowledge and providing them classroom English are essential. Pre-communicative activities are to release students speaking potential by lowering their anxiety. The pre-communicative activities conform with college students current English level and the goal of the activities is to transform students' receptive skills into productive skills. Statistics are collected before and after the activities to prove the effectiveness of activating students' speaking potential in class.In the fifth chapter the author summarizes the thesis. As the term "pre-communicative" shows, the activities are only preliminary in developing students' speaking ability but they are effective to throw away the labels of "dumb English" and "low-efficiency".