Students' Discourse Right In College English Classroom

The latest College English Curriculum Requirements (2004) focus more onfostering undergraduates' English skills in listening and speaking. With theglobalization of the world, college students are required to have higher Englishproficiency in actual communication. That is, they must be able to communicate withnative speakers without difficulty. However, the author's surveys have shown that mostcollege students are not satisfied with their oral English proficiency, while theyrecognize how important oral English is and they are eager to speak good and fluentEnglish.One of the most important reasons for this situation, according to the author'sresearch (SPSS11.0 is used to analyze the data from the questionnaire), is that manycollege English teachers are still the centre in class and they occupy over 65% ofdiscourse right in class. In current college English teaching class, it is common thatteaching is considered as a process of instruction from teachers to learners, and theopportunities for communications are few between teachers and learners or betweenlearners and learners. Therefore, learners have few opportunities for oral interaction,which leads to the imbalance of discourse right.Discourse right in class is students' speaking right, which allows students toexpress their views about life and work freely and completely. In class discourse rightconsists of three parts: teacher, students and teaching materials, thus in this specialsocial background, students should have at least 40% of discourse right to reflect theirconcepts, thoughts, attitude and values. In doing so, they can learn ways to speakreasonably or responsively and gradually improve their ability to express themselves.In the thesis the author has done research into the imbalance of discourse right inthe college English teaching classroom and the deficiency or disadvantages in current college English teachers' method, and explored the influences and effects of discourseright on their oral English. The theoretical foundations of the research are cognitivetheory, sociocultural theory in linguistics, humanism in philosophy, the InputHypothesis and Output Hypothesis in Second language Acquisition (SLA).Through these theoretical studies, it is concluded that discourse right for students'oral English is paramount. Learners should be viewed as active participants in theknowledge acquisition process. The mechanism which makes declarative knowledgeslowly become proceduralized is practice. Therefore, practice is necessary andessential. Social interactions which give rise to learners' second language developmentare a dialectic and organic combination between input and output. From thisperspective, language instruction is viewed not just in term of providingcomprehendible input, but rather as helping students enter into all kinds of authenticsocial discourse situations and discourse communities that they will later encounteroutside the classroom. Humanists give primacy to the study of human needs andinterests. Students will learn best what they want and need to know. In languagelearning, a certain amount of output is especially important to raise learners' speakinglevel. Therefore, teachers should also help students to find ways to have output andprovide them with chances to practice English in classroom.A college teacher and the author execute an experimental teaching for a wholesemester, in which the Task-based Approach (TBA) is used with the PerformanceAssessments and the Portfolio Assessment. The practice tasks are designed accordingto our students' real English proficiency and the teaching materials available.Furthermore, students are provided with at least 40% of discourse right in every classto encourage them to have more output of English.The Task-based Approach originating from a communicative approach in whichthe idea of student-centered teaching can really be put into practice. Learners are givenenough space to develop language ability on their own route of learning, and givenenough discourse right in class to take advantage of oral interaction in class. In thisapproach, a learning environment guided by the teachers gives students the optimumconditions for learning. Students are presented with questions, problems or tasks, anddiscuss with others the ways of solving or handling problems. Thus, students aretrained to face problems and to solve problems during the process of problem solving.It is clear that the essence of enabling is what English teaching is trying to turn to.The application of the assessments can strongly push students to particioate in the oral interactions actively, to express themselves in English and to avoid "dumbEnglish". The Performance-based assessments are designed to evaluate what studentscan do with what they know, using direct methods of evaluation, such as evaluatingoral presentations to assess speaking and can evaluate how effectively a group ofstudents perform. A portfolio consists of a systematic and organized collection of astudent's work that demonstrates the student's skills and accomplishments. A portfoliois a purposeful collection of work that reveals the student's progress and achievements.The teaching experiment shows that adequate discourse right and opportunitiesfor students to interact orally with each other can arouse their interests and cooperationin the learning process. The experiment also shows that learning process for thosestudents, in fact, is a process of learning activities and strategies that help students toimprove their oral English proficiency, foster their learner autonomy and change theirrole and responsibility for leaning from solely teacher-directed to some measure ofautonomy. Hopefully, the developed skills will propel students to continue theirlanguage learning beyond the class, to become more active in seeking opportunities toenhance their skills, and to feel more confident in the application of their English skillsin their lives and in their future work. Meanwhile, the teachers can have more power tocarry out the classroom activities. Although the method adopted in the experimentalteaching is not the best teaching method, it is effective and useful for students toimprove their oral English.