The Relation Of Traditional And Non-traditional Approach Learners To Speaking And Writing Learning Skills-A Case Study

Nowadays more and more foreign scholars critically discuss about Chinese English learning approach. It is obvious that adopting a different learning approach may result in different language proficiency. In China, Professor Wen Qiufang (1996) mainly divided English language learners into two categories: traditional approach learners and non-traditional approach learners. As we know, the purpose of learners choosing different learning approaches is to improve their language skills, and what kind of skills can demonstrate the level of English proficiency is extensively debated by many people. There are many people who argue that traditional approach learners are skilled in writing accuracy and non-traditional approach learners take more advantages on oral fluency. The author thinks that there is not sufficient evidence to prove this. Therefore, enlightened by Wen Qiufang's framework of language learning, the researcher carried out a case study combined with quantitative and qualitative analysis to solve the mentioned problem. In order to effectively testify this assumption, fluency and accuracy as indices of this study, reveal how important it is to a second language learner in language production. The present quantitative study was designed to investigate the difference of two groups of learners, and most importantly, to what extent and what kind of difference there is between them. The qualitative study was conducted to further illustrate the outcome calculated by the quantitative data.The subjects were 6 undergraduate English majors at a provincial university in southwest China selected from 62 third-year students, from whom speaking and writing data were collected under time constraints. Five fluency measures and one accuracy measure, counted respectively, were adopted in the analysis of the oral English. In addition, three writing fluency measures and four writing accuracy measures were applied to investigate the compositions.The data were analyzed with SPSS statistical analysis software. T-value analysis was employed to investigate the difference between the traditional approach learners and the non-traditional approach learners, from which five measures (speaking rate, articulation rate, phonation/time ratio, mean length of runs, and average length of pause) showed a positive difference with the speaking tests, and relative equivalence was found on measure of ratio of error-free T-units to total T-units. The three writing fluency measures (words per minute, sentence length, and T-unit length) showed rather strong difference in written tests, and the same difference was found on measures of words in error-free T-units, words in error-free clauses, error-free T-unit length, and error-free clause length. Results indicated a moderate difference between the two groups of learners.The qualitative analysis was contributed to find out the deep reasons resulting in different language proficiency. Integrated with two independent foreign teachers' judgments and IELTS scoring schemes, it shows a clear picture of the students from a southwestern provincial university in China: the non-traditional approach learners are superior to the traditional approach learners in oral fluency and writing accuracy.The present study discusses the different language ability of the traditional approach learners and the non-traditional approach learners with fluency and accuracy measures in L2 speaking and writing assessment. Those measures with discriminating ability appear to be yardsticks in language production assessment by which researchers could expediently gauge a learner's speaking and writing proficiency in a second language. It is suggested that language learners and teachers should pay due attention to linguistic output skills. Further studies are needed to explore speaking and writing as psychological and cognitive processes in order to understand the real complexity of language production as a whole.