An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Process Evaluation Of Listening Input On Oral Output

With the furthering of China's reform and opening-up, exchanges between China and other countries are more frequent. Foreign trade developing, academic exchanges and cultural publicizing provide people with more chances to communicate with foreign friends face to face. And the talent markets now pay much attention to graduates' ability to use the English. However, many college students who seem to express themselves fluently have difficulty understanding what others say in conversation, which hinders their communication with others in English. In the year 2004, the Ministry of Education started a trial work on reforming college English teaching. One of the important aims of the reform is to enable the students to use English for efficient oral information exchange in their future work and social contacts.The study intends to develop the non-English majors' oral output by conducting an empirical study, taking the input theory and output theory from second language acquisition as theoretical basis and process evaluation of listening input as a means. It is hoped that this process evaluation can reinforce students' language knowledge for the results of internalization and enhance their oral output ability. The research adopted a grouping experiment way, trying to answer the following questions. 1) What effects does the process evaluation of listening input have on promoting the students' explicit oral output performance? 2) What effects will the integration of intensive listening input practice and guided oral output practice have on students' learning behavior?The subjects of the research were 163 non-English majors from 4 classes inGuangxi University, among which 2 classes were the experimental groups whilethe other 2 classes were the control groups. The experiment was conducted intwo phases. The main contents of the experiment were as follows. Students fromthe experimental groups listened to the special listening materials from theschool radio after classes, and then they were given weekly listening quizzesabout the listening assignment in that week. And related guided oral practicewas organized. The independent variables are process evaluation of listeningpractice and the related guided oral practice, and the dependant variable is theimprovement in English oral communication. A survey was made throughquestionnaire and interviews to investigate the subjects' attitude towards theexperiment. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis on the experimentresults, the research draws the following conclusions. 1) Process evaluationcould effectively promote non-English major students to intake listeninginformation; 2) The guided oral practice, emphasizing absorbing listeninginformation, could effectively stimulate the internalization of language andimprove students' communicative competence; 3) To promote communicationcompetence with listening practice and to reinforce listening through oral practice were more helpful to the average students and underachievers. The integration of intensive listening input and guided oral output practice helped students realize the importance of regular listening input and develop their learning autonomy.