The Influence Of Self-esteem On Narrative English Oral Production Of Chinese Learners

The objectives of the present study are to investigate the influence of self-esteem on Chinese English learners'oral performance in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity; and to explore what are the differences between the high self-esteem subjects (HSES) and the low self-esteem subjects (LSES) in the narrative oral task and how these relate to self-esteem as well. The results of the present study were drawn with quantitative and qualitative research methods, and they were explained with humanist psychology theory, Krashen's Affective Hypothesis, especially, the Monitor model and oral production hypothesis. These results are beneficial to the development of Chinese English learner's oral production learning and teaching.The 42 subjects participating in the present study were full-time second year undergraduate students, studying in the department of English of Northwest Normal University. They were selected randomly. Oral narrative task was chosen for the subjects to elicit the oral production, and all their speech production data was analyzed quantitatively with SPSS, in terms of six linguistic variables: speech rate (RateA), articulate Rate (RateB), error-free clause, syntactic complexity, syntactic variety and lexical variety. In addition, the qualitative data were derived from the test scale—Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (SES) to get the score of the self-esteem. And also discourse features analyzed to explore the indicator of high and low self-esteem group.The results of the present research are following:(1) Self-esteem (SE) was strongly and positively correlated to fluency of English oral production in narrative task; and it was also positively correlated to accuracy of oral production. And there were significant differences between high and low self-esteem group in fluency and accuracy. However, there did not found significant correlation between Self-esteem (SE) and complexity of L2 oral production.(2) The analysis of discourse features indicated that there were significant differences in paralanguage cues and communicative strategies used by the learners which indicated the high self-esteem learners or the low self-esteem learners. These were showed in the following: the number of pauses and types of pause, ways of self-repair, communicative strategies.At last, the author combined the present findings and discussions, expounded the educational implications in oral English learning and teaching in the Chinese classroom, and the limitations as well, further proposed some suggestions for the future related research.The paper was consisted of six main parts: part one mainly introduce the research orientation and significance. Part two is a review of the related literature on the research questions and the necessity of the research is stated. The third part is the theoretical framework of the study and the theories involved. And the fourth part is the methodology, including the subject, oral production task, the measures of self-esteem as well as the oral production, and the procedure of the data collection. Fifth part is the analysis of data: the results of the study and the discussion were presented. And the last part is the conclusion, including the major findings, limitation and suggestions for the future related research, and the education implications.