Application Of Imitation-Recitation-Retelling Strategy To Oral English Teaching For Minority Students Of Non-Ethnic University

Imitation-recitation-retelling (IRR) Strategy can be said to be a perfect combination of Chinese and western methodology, through which learners can enhance their speaking ability in various aspects. The dominant methodologies in the world, whether Direct Teaching Approach or Listening and Speaking Method or Audio- Visual Method, all give their priority to imitation in their teaching processes. Recitation is a traditional way of learning Chinese, which is widely applied to language teaching in China. Scholars and language masters all have drawn great benefits from the recitation in their youth, and it has been used as an effective method in English class in China. Retelling differs from recitation, which is a creation and refinery based on recitation. IRR strategy has its own solid theoretical foundations—Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis.Kunming University of Science and Technology (KUST) is situated in the southwest border province with a population of many peoples, so it has admitted about 20% of minority students, who are respectively in the 16 schools of KUST learning a hundred–odd different majors. In the colleges and universities for minority students, their problems with English learning are the very concern of the leadership and easy to solve. However, in the non-minority colleges and universities, all the students follow the same new teaching modes. The survey made by the author of this paper reveals that the same new teaching modes are not suitable to the minority students of KUST. Then the author introduces the Imitation-Recitation-Retelling (IRR) strategy to college oral English teaching, aiming to study whether it fits well with the minority students with their English level below average, and especially their improvement on oral English. The success of the IRR strategy will be a beneficial complement to college oral English teaching and learning and provide some reference for the teachers engaging in teaching minority students with poor English level in the non-minority colleges and universities.