A Study Of The Impact Of Speaking Strategies On Non-English Majors' Oral Proficiency

For Chinese second/foreign language learners, there always exits a huge dilemma for them. They are quite commonly confronted with such problem that they often find it hard to maintain their conversation with native speakers because they can not find any word or expression through their mind. Concerned with such circumstances, the author tempted to find out a compact of speaking strategies on non-English majors'oral proficiency. Based on such a thesis, the paper was carried out by two major parts.The first part is a literature review on a few theories such as oral proficiency, language learning strategy, as well as speaking strategy. The author adopted "the 1999 ACTFL Oral proficiency Interview Tester Training Manual"(Swender 1999; adapted from Hadley 2001,14) to demonstrate the criteria of oral proficiency. Then, the author gave a very specific introduction of the definition and the classification of language learning strategy, as well as speaking strategies.After the brief review, the author then focused on a survey and spoken English test conducted at Tijuana University of Technology. Subjects are the eighty-two non-English majors from Law School. The instruments are questionnaires and oral testing. The data will be collected and analyze by SPSS to:a. identify the general patterns of language learning strategies employed by Chinese non-English majors;b. determine the relationship between language learning strategies and oral proficiency, and the relationship between speaking strategies and oral proficiency respectively.There are also some implications drawn out of the results of the research and some practical suggestions for Chinese teachers about how to perform successful strategy training on the purpose of improving learners'oral proficiency.