Relationship Between Communication Strategies Teaching And Oral English Fluency Development For Non-English Major Postgraduates

This paper presents studies on the relationship between communication strategies teaching and oral English fluency development for non-English major postgraduates.The role oral fluency development plays in language acquisition and foreign language teaching receives more and more affirmation and emphasis, and substantial theoretical explorations and empirical studies have been done in this field by researchers at home and abroad. However, most researches on oral fluency focus on second language acquisition in natural environment while fewer researches are carried out on second language acquisition activities in class, especially in countries where natural environment in real sense does not exist.Derived from the concept of"communicative competence"proposed by Hymes (1972), the communicative approach in language teaching becomes popular nowadays where strategic competence occupies an important aspect. Based on this theoretical foundation, the author conducts an empirical study in the hope of revealing what relationship between communication strategies teaching and oral fluency development exists. Referring to all of the available literature concerned, the author believes that the research vacancy on this point at home and abroad is to be filled.Since the policy of postgraduates enrollment expansion was adopted in 1999, there have been over one million non-English major postgraduates learning English in China, forming a group that cannot be ignored in language teaching. However, although they have learned English for about over ten years and have acquired enough grammatical rules and vocabulary, they seem to have difficulties in oral speaking. To some extent, their deficiency in oral English fluency results from their weak strategic competence, which deserves sufficient emphasis. Therefore, the present paper aims at researches on the relationship between communication strategies teaching and oral English fluency development for non-English major postgraduates, making an attempt to arrive at enlightenment in English language teaching for non-English major postgraduates in China.Sieved out from 88 non-English major postgraduates of 4 classes of Grade 2006 from a national key university of Hefei, Anhui Province, 44 participants of 2 classes are finally taken as the research subjects, for they are most similar in average English level, ratio of males to females, and some other elements involved in this study. The two classes are labeled as experiment class and control class by the author at random. English language teaching without any variable differences proceeds in both the two classes for 1 term, namely, 18 weeks, except that communication strategies teaching is only added to the teaching of the experiment class. Oral pretest-posttest with a series of pictures employed for the subjects to describe, accompanied by close-end grades scale surveys into questions related to the cognition and acceptability of communication strategies, is conducted in both of the two classes before and after the communication strategies teaching. The oral tests recordings and the survey results are collected, with Cool Edit Pro 2.1 employed to translate the recordings into wave forms which facilitate subsequent observation and statistics and SPSS 15.0 employed to conduct data processing, such as mean value, standard deviation, and paired-samples t test, to analyze and compare the differences of the students'consciousness and frequency of using communication strategies, differences reflected by 12 fluency indices of 4 types (temporal indices, performance indices, linguistic indices, and content index), and the acceptability of communication strategies teaching in oral fluency development in the control class and the experiment class before and after the communication strategies training. The results of the comparative study indicate that, non-English major postgraduates show significant progress in their consciousness and frequency of using communication strategies after the teaching and their oral language performance is characterized by higher level of smoothness, confidence, efficiency of speech planning, complexity of syntactical structures, coherence, but no higher ratio of correctness. Furthermore, the surveys into acceptability show that most of the non-English major postgraduates admit the effect of communication strategies teaching in oral fluency development and are willing to accept more such training.Finally, the paper lists the limitations existing in this research, namely, small sample, short research duration, deficiencies in tools employed and variables control, and demands for assistance of qualitative researches.