The Effects Of Communication Strategy Training On Chinese Students' Oral Proficiency

My interest in the research of relationship between students' use of communication strategy and their oral achievement is the result of having taught English for many years and, during this period, I have repeatedly encountered such questions as how to prepare for oral English test and also complaints of many examiners' about many Chinese learners' incompetence in their speaking ability. Many people negatively comment Chinese learners' oral proficiency by saying "Chinese students have learned English for more than 10 years, but they were trained to be deaf learners and dumb learners. They didn't know how to carry on a fluent and appropriate conversation with a native." Wen Qiufang, once sharply pointed out ,after a CET oral test, that, many students even don't know how to initiate a conversation ,how to take turns ,how to repair mistakes and how to keep conversation going."很多中国学生在测试过程中都暴露出交际原则掌握不好,有的只顾自已讲,不顾对方讲话,有的抢对方话头,不让对方把话说完,(文秋芳)Since the ultimate purpose of language learning is to use it for communication, then how to improve learners' communicative competence becomes a crucial task for language teachers. A said- to- be-very-effective approach, communication strategies (CSs), thus attracted great attention from quite a lot of language teachers and researchers. However, most of the attention was paid to current patterns of oral communication strategy (CS) use, to what degree these strategies can be explicitly taught, and how communication strategy (CSs) should be trained in class and there were seldom researches which dealt with the extent to which strategy use can lead to improvements in oral communication ability, or how much the use of communication strategy (CSs) can help test taker achieve a high mark in oral test. So, in this thesis, I attached great importance to the relationship between the use of communication strategy (CSs) and students score in oral test. A quasi-experimental study was used.In a 12-week English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course based on a communicative approach, 84 learners were divided into 2 groups. The strategy training group (n = 39) received metacognitive training, focusing on OCS use, whereas the control group (n = 45)...