A Study On Applying Behavioral Theories To College Oral English Teaching

As China's economy has been developing rapidly in the past years, international communication is increasing day by day. English as one of the most widely used languages in the world is playing a more important role. However, most Chinese college students meet a common problem while learning English, that is, although they have worked hard on English, their oral English is not very good. Some of them cannot even carry out daily communication in oral English. Some even can hardly speak English at all.Behaviorists believe language is a behavior, so they advocate imitation, reinforcement and repetition in language learning to achieve the purpose of habit formation. This conforms to the characteristics of oral English learning that attaches importance to practice.The thesis explores how to apply behavioral theories to college oral English teaching to solve the problems students have when learning oral English.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the aim and significance of the study.Chapter Two is a literature review, introducing the main theories of behaviorism, its influence on second language learning as well as the revisions of behaviorism by Albert Bandura.Chapter Three includes a survey and oral English teaching methods. The author first conducted a survey about the current level of oral English for non-English majors. The results showed that most students have recognized the importance of oral English and would like to improve their oral English skills. In spite of their hard work, they seem to have trouble in progressing their oral English skills. The reasons are as follows: oral English is ignored under the traditional college English teaching methods, students lack practice in oral English, the lack of a good oral English-speaking environment and anxiety which is caused mainly by students'personalities. Regarding these problems, the author suggested a series of teaching methods based on behaviorism such as strengthening stimulus-response in oral English learning, learning step by step, reducing the negative transfers of Chinese, etc.Chapter Four contains an empirical study. After a semester of experimentation, the author gave an oral English test to the control and experiment classes. Subsequently, the data was collected and analyzed. Finally, a conclusion was drawn.Chapter Five is the conclusion. The author first summarized the thesis, and then pointed out the implications and limitations of the study.