A Study Of Theme-Based Group Teaching Of College Oral English

With China entering WTO successfully and preparing to host the 2008 Olympics, a more modern educational system that prepares people to interact with global society is urgently needed. By contrast, oral English is often undeveloped for those students of English non-majors. A combination of potent inhibitors is responsible for this situation: large class size, traditional teaching method and time constraints. On the basis of analyzing the requirements for college English teaching, the paper argues for the importance of taking these factors into consideration and intends to resolve it in terms of theme-based oral approach (TBOA).Theme-based oral English teaching refers to teaching English in theme-based context on basis of group work in the student-centered classroom, aiming at promoting English learners' oral English proficiency. As early as 1996, Huang Yueyuan and Gu Yueguo both discussed about the practice of student-centered and integrated teaching method, and later some other researchers and teachers such as Ye (1998), Shan (2000) and Peng (2004) have studied the application of this method in practice from different angles. However, it is a great pity that all those studies have been done in the field of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation in general and none of them has touched the specific field of oral English and no one has evaluated this study in professional way. This thesis expounds TBOA from the theoretical perspective of cognition, constructivism, humanistic psychology and cooperative learning under the guidance of communicative method. And it attempts to prove that TBOA lends itself to oral English teaching for non-English majors, which integrates the meaningful classroom teaching of college teachers with autonomous learning from the students by means of group activities. Various dynamic classroom activities are recommended, such as group discussion, role play, debate, questions & answers which are all based on the single theme in the same unit.In this study the author tries to evaluate TBOA and finds it able to motivate the students to speak in class and a certain percentage of students can overcome their psychological problems in expressing ideas. In order to promote oral English output ofundergraduate English non-majors, TBOA is carried out on the basis of New Horizon College English. Accordingly, the research questions to be addressed are as follows:1. Is theme-based oral approach worthwhile and practical to improve oral English for English non-majors in EFL class? Why and how?2. Is it advisable to adopt New Horizon College English as one of the most appropriate teaching materials to put the theme-based approach into practice? Why?3. What are those specific measures and classroom activities possibly to be carried out so as to develop students' oral English proficiency on the approach of theme-based instruction?4. Do students appreciate the theme-based oral approach in terms of group work? What can be found from that?The study follows the quantitative and qualitative method on the 286 non-English majors from 6 different classes in 3 different universities, in light of questionnaire, interview, class observation, and so on. The questionnaire involves reflection upon the different factors in TBOA, such as theme, teacher, student, teaching & learning environment, teaching material, classroom activities and so on. All the data, along with the results from the questionnaire have been analyzed by SPSS (12.0) and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. Classroom observation lasted for a whole semester to get the general descriptions of teacher's management and students' activities under TBOA. And some of the typical classroom teaching and learning has been photographed as a reference. 8 students and 5 teachers from different classes were interviewed to talk about their general ideas and reflections upon the approach and their experience of oral English learning and teaching in class.According to the survey and analysis, a majority of students have the positive points towards this new teaching method, while there is still a minor part insisting on the unsatisfactory teaching effects. Some students propose that less teaching time, fewer communicative chances, imperfect teaching materials are worth improving in the near future. In the end, the study concludes that traditional teaching method no longer meets the current needs of college students in 21 century and lags far behind the requirements of the modern world while the suggested teaching pattern (TBOA) justifies itself to be beneficial and profitable in reality by some tentative teaching strategies after one-year research and experiment. On the other hand, the author puts forward that some related...