Communicative Oral English Testing And Interactive Oral English Teaching

As one of the four important communication skills, speaking has long been neglected in the language teaching, while oral English teaching and testing have always been the weak points in college English education. Since China began to reform and open the door to the outside world, the Chinese government has seen proficiency in communicative English as an essential factor to the successful implementation of the policy. However, the traditional oral English education failed to meet the demand of social development, for many graduates couldn't communicate in English smoothly. This is due to the inappropriateness of traditional oral English education. Many problems occurred in traditional oral English classroom and there are a lot of deficiencies lying in it: Full exposure to communication with English native speaker is not available; the oversize class minimized student-teacher interaction, prevent teacher surveillance of individual performance, and discouraged independent thinking; class hours are not sufficient, students have no enough time to practice; lack of Leading-In activities and psychology preparation; lack of pragmatic knowledge (such as the culture, custom) teaching; the traditional classroom tends to be one-way communication or teacher-centered; lack of activities to cultivate students' creative thinking abilities. Communication Strategies are not mentioned in the oral classroom. Students don't know how to manage to communicate when they encounter communicative problems due to the lack of the adequate knowledge of the target language.The Chinese authorities have expressed concerned at the low level of communication skills in English. Given the aim that most English learners in China are to use English for purpose of communication. Therefore, it is necessary for English teachers to do lots of research to find better ways to improve students' oral English. In other words, teachers should help learners to acquire not the form of language but communicative competence. Then learners can output efficiency according to different situation.A large number of examinations in the past have encouraged a tending to separate testing from teaching. Both testing and teaching are so closely interrelated that it is virtually impossible to work in either field without being concerned with the other. Tests may be constructed primarily as devices to reinforce learning and to motivate the student or performance in the language. In the former case, the test is geared to the teaching that has taken place, whereas in the latter case, the teaching is often geared largely to the test. Standardized tests and public examinations, in fact, may exert such as a considerable influence on average teacher that they are often instrumental in determining the kind of teaching that takes place before the test. Oral English testing and oral English teaching are just like the two sides of the coin. They are two closely interrelated factors for according students' communicative ability. Based on the theory of communicative competence, this paper makes a qualitative analysis of CET-SET (the spoken English Test of College English TEST) and focus on how to improve it,for CET is a large-scale standard test whose purpose is to evaluate and promote the application of the National College English Teaching Syllabus (NCETS) and to deepen the English teaching reform so as to improve English teaching quality in China. A new CET-SET model, which concerned more on evaluating students' communicative ability, is given in this paper. Matching with this new testing model, this paper also gives a new oral English teaching method which interact listening, reading, and writing with speaking, for speaking cannot be taught or learned separately from other three skills. The four skills should be integrated. Therefore, the communicative ability of students can be improved in an effective way.This thesis consists of five parts, including the introduction and the conclusion.Part one is the introduction. First, the current situation of testing is described. It includes new direction in language testing, the classification of the oral tests and a survey of current oral testing in the world and in China. Then the current situation of college oral English teaching is introduced. It includes the problems occurred in oral English classroom and the deficiencies of traditional oral English classroom. At last, the relationship between language testing and teaching is analyzed. This part shows the urgent need for communicative test of spoken English for college students and the urgent need for the interactive teaching of spoken English for them.Part two presents the theoretical background of the construction of communicative testing and interactive teaching—communicative competence proposed by Cannal and Swain (1988), Canal (1989) and Bachman (1990).Part three and part four are the body parts of the thesis. Part 3 makes an introduction of CET-SET firstly, which includes background of CET-SET, CET-SET format, CET-SET content and CET-SET Rating. Later, it makes a qualitative analysis of CET-SET from five aspects: Topic Range, Examiner/Candidate Ratio, Test Format, the Interactive Mode Analysis and Marking Scheme Analysis. Then, questionnaires and investigation is given here. The aim is to collect candidates' views on CET-SET to improve the quality of CET-SET. At last, a new CET-SET model is described in details.Factors contributing to students' communicative competence are introduced in part four firstly. Then a model of Interactive oral English teaching is. suggested from six aspects: teaching objective, teaching materials, teaching techniques, teaching procedure, students and teachers. At last, through the evaluation, it shows the advantages in taking the new oral testing model and the interactive oral teaching model.Part five is the concluding remarks.