An Action Research Aiming To Improve Evening College Students' Participation Performance In Oral English Class

Since the 1980s, action research, as an approach in which teachers directly participate in the research, was widely spread in western developed and developing countries and had played a significant role in the educational field. Until after the 1990s, action research was introduced to China's foreign language teaching field and has caused wide concerns. As a type of systematically reflective research, its starting point is to solve various problems that occur in the practical teaching environment. In the teaching process, after meticulous observation and analysis of the identified problems, the teacher tries to take measures to solve the problems. Meanwhile, teachers keep summarizing and recording emerging problems in the process of collecting data and address problems so that revised solutions will be adopted and then the educational research will be developing in a spiral manner. In this way, not only will problems be solved and teaching effects be improved, but also teachers engaged in the research will perfect and enhance their own development as well as deepening their understanding towards teaching process.This paper is an action research aiming to improve students' participation in the oral English class. The subjects are 36 evening college students in Beijing Forestry University who were enrolled in 2009 and chose English as their major. The author attempted to conduct an action research by combining it with the communicative language teaching approach in the foreign language teaching field. With task-based language teaching as a blue print, the author designed eight types of classroom activities, in the hope that they would stimulate students'motivation and increase their oral English output in the class whilst the author's teaching ability. After eight weeks'action research, by analyzing and evaluating the collected data as well as continuously reflecting during the process, the author answered the following three research questions:1) Students'English proficiency, peer pressure and the types of classroom activities have an impact on their classroom participation; 2) As far as the students are concerned, language games containing current issues and popular topics are their most interested classroom activities;3) Tasks that are two-way and have finite solutions can help students produce more language output.The author hopes that his research can offer some experience and help to teachers who are in charge of teaching adults oral English class and provide a reference for those who are interested in the action research.