A Study On Teaching Spoken English Through Movies For Non-English Majors

With the rapid development of economy and IT industry, popular culture has exerted a highly significant influence on college students. Many language teachers try to use movies to stimulate students'motivation for language learning activities. This thesis is a research report of an investigation on a semester's study of the effects of teaching spoken English through movies. The study is conducted in the hope that it may be of some value to Chinese college English teaching, which pays more and more attention to students'communicative competence.In the thesis, the author first briefly introduces theories of motivation and learning supporting the application of movies to the language classroom and presents the advantages of movies as the main carrier of language materials for oral English. In order to study the motivating role of movies as the main carrier of language materials and effects of teaching spoken English through movies, two groups of 68 college students were chosen as subjects of the study, 33 in the experimental group and 35 in the control group. The difference lied in that the experimental group had an oral English class employing movies as the main vehicle of language materials, while the control group using the traditional textbook-based language materials. Due to the advantages of movies as the carrier of language materials, various activities for the experimental group were designed to get students involved in the language learning process. For the control group, the language learning activities listed in the textbook were conducted in the classroom.The data were collected through two questionnaires, a pretest and a posttest of spoken English. The first questionnaire surveyed all students'motivational intensity in taking the oral English classes and their ideas about improvement in some aspects of oral English. At the end of the semester, the second questionnaire investigated students'attitudes towards teaching spoken English through movies. A pretest and a posttest of spoken English for both groups were conducted at the beginning and the end of the semester respectively. The data of the pretest and posttest were processed by the software SPSS.After analyzing the results from the survey study and experimental study, the author reaches tentative conclusions that movies as the vehicle of learning materials can better motivate students in the language classroom than the traditional textbook-based language materials. Students instructed with language materials from movies performed better in the posttest of oral English, and more students in the experimental group got deeper understanding in certain aspects of oral English. Moreover, most students in the experimental group held positive attitudes towards teaching spoken English through movies.The thesis ends by pointing out the limitations of the study. Suggestions are made from the perspectives that more subjects should be involved in the further study and a more scientific instructional procedure should be designed for the practical class teaching.