An Input-Output Approach To The Influence Of Listening On Oral English

With the furthering of China's reform and opening-up, exchanges between China and other countries are more frequent than before. The development of foreign trade, academic exchanges and cultural communications all provide people with more chances to communicate with foreign friends face to face and the human resources markets now pay much attention to graduates'ability to use English. However, many college students who seem to have a good performance in writing test have difficulty in expressing themselves orally. In 2004, the Ministry of Education started a trial work on reforming college English teaching. One of the important aims of the reform is to enable the students to use English for efficient oral information exchanges in their future work and social interactions.This study intends to develop non-English majors'oral output by conducting an empirical study, taking the Krashen's input hypothesis and Swain's output hypothesis in second language acquisition as theoretical basis and taking listening input and speaking output as a means. It is hoped that this adding input can reinforce students'language knowledge as the result of internalization and thus enhance their oral output ability. This research adopts a grouping experiment method, trying to answer the following questions:1. What is the relationship between listening comprehension and the improvement of oral English? Whether the adding of listening comprehension has an effect on oral competence with the condition that learners should practice their oral English?2. To what extent can listening input improve oral competence of learners?3. What effects does the integration of adding listening input and oral output practice have on students'learning behavior?The subjects of the research are 112 non-English majors from 2 classes in China University of Petroleum (East China), one of which is the experimental group (56) with the other as the control group (56). The main contents of the experiment are as follows. Students in the experimental group take College English Listening and Speaking Course as the textbook. After they finish the listening and speaking tasks, they have to login in Lange Campus-Wide Language Learning Platform to accomplish assigned listening materials and related speaking practice and they are asked to take notes about the content they listen to and talk about.,while students in the control group are taught as usual. After the experiment, students in the experimental group and control group have their oral English tests respectively. Their recordings are compared with those of the last semester and analyzed with the quantitative method.The independent variables are listening input and oral practice, and the dependent variable is oral communication. Meanwhile, a survey is conducted through observation and interviews to investigate the subjects'attitude towards the experiment. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the experiment results, the research arrives at the following conclusions:1. Adding listening can promote non-English majors'input effectively;2. The oral practice emphasizing absorbing listening information can effectively stimulate the internalization of language and improve students'communicative competence;3. Promoting communication competence with listening practice is more helpful to average students and underachievers.