A Study Of The Relationship Between Writing And Speaking Skills With Chinese College-level ESL Students

The relationship between writing and speaking has become a keen issue in second language pedagogy and research. This issue has received an increasingly large attention of linguists and English language learners. Many studies have been conducted on the relationship between speaking and writing in L1 acquisition. Similarly, many language researchers have made their efforts to explore this issue in L2 acquisition in the past few decades. Nonetheless, it is still far from clear what the relationship between writing and speaking with students of a Chinese background is exactly like, for different school backgrounds, different kinds of regular English classroom instructions and diverse social backgrounds will lead to different results (Hafiz and Tudor, 1990).This study aims to investigate the relationship between writing and speaking skills of college-level ESL students with a Chinese background. Based on the previous research and the language output theories, an English writing sample and a speaking test attached with a questionnaire were designed to explore the relationship. Forty third-year English Majors from Jinhua College of Education in Zhejiang Province participated in the experiment. The writing test was a 45-minute test in which all 80 students from two classes in the same grade were asked to write an essay on an experimental topic. Forty subjects were selected randomly from among these 80 students to participate in speaking test. Samples of both the writing test and speaking test were collected and analyzed. The objective measures of Pearson correlation and syntactic maturity, T-unit, were adopted in the analysis to test the following hypotheses:1. There are positive correlations between the participants' writing skill and speaking skill; there is significant relationship between writing and speaking skills.2. Students with a higher proficiency in writing would produce more correct words and sentences than those with a lower proficiency in both written and spokensamples.The findings yielded thereafter are: 1. There is a positive relationship between writing and speaking skills with Chinese college-level ESL students.2. Students with a higher proficiency in writing produce more T-units, make fewer errors, and incorporate more subordinate clauses than students with a lower proficiency in both writing and speaking but comparatively produce fewer words in speaking. Conversely, students with a lower proficiency are able to produce more words within a specific period of time in speaking but are less able to produce acceptable English according to such conventionally-accepted criteria as T-units, the number of errors and the number of subordinations per text in both writing and speaking.3. The analysis of the questionnaire indicates that opinions of more than half percentage of the tested students are for the notion that writing has a positive correlation with speaking, which is also accord with the result of this study.The conclusions are as follows. On average, students who write well speak well, and students who are not good at writing don't speak well. In this sense, the researcher argues that writing can help students develop their speaking ability. At the same time, the data in this study also show that students who are good at writing comparatively produce fewer words in speaking. This illustrates that writing ability is not exactly equal to speaking ability. The function of speaking activities can not be replaced by writing ones. It can only be used to facilitate students' speaking ability in an indirect way.It is hoped in this thesis that, in the ESL teaching, while an all-round effort should be exerted to achieve a balanced development of the four basic language skills, the relationship between writing and speaking should be paid a special attention to. It is also suggested in the thesis that writing and speaking activities in classroom interactions be combined in an organic way with an emphasis on writing so as to ensure a fundamental improvement of the output language skills of Chinese college-level students.