The Application Of Context Theory To College Spoken English Teaching

According to College English Syllabus,the aim of college English teaching is to enable students to acquire the competence in listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating.Reading and writing are taken into enormous consideration,while speaking and listening have shown more and more importance in everyday life and in new College English Syllabus sine 2004.With China entering of WTO,it seems that most of the teachers have realized this point.The current situation of college English teaching is actually far from satisfaction in meeting the goal of communicating in English fluently and accurately.The classroom teaching is still characterized by one-way communication or teacher-centered most of the period under the circumstance of time constrain.The teacher controls the direction and process,the students having few opportunities to express themselves.Although recent years have seen great hard work the college English teachers have done,changes must be made for the betterment of ELF in China.The author applied context theory to the practice of teaching spoken English and found it quite effective to improve non-English major's oral production.Two parallel non-English classes A and B being chosen at random from Qingdao College,Oceans University of China,Class A was taught in traditional way while Class B was put into real-like context as much as possible.In order to make the data convinced,the author had 60 students,30 chosen randomly from each class,tested on their oral English proficiency in the first week and the last week of a semester.The data told us the students were not much different in oral production in the first week,but quite different in the last week----the students from Class B did much better.A questionnaire was another research method employed among 40 students of Class B in this study.It showed that the students had known context little and context theory instructed English teaching or English learning little.The procedure employed in class during the whole semester was accepted and welcomed,esp.dubbing the film. This research falls into five chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction to the background to the research.Chapter 2 mainly reviews and summarizes the theories and contributions about theory of context which were made by many scholars.This chapter lays a solid theoretical foundation for the following chapters.Chapter 3 is the empirical study,comparing two parallel classes by questionnaire and test of oral English proficiency.Chapter 4 discusses the results and Chapter 5 is the conclusion part,presenting major findings and limitations.