An Empirical Study On Improving High School Students' English Achievements Through Increasing Chances Of Speaking English

With the development of the society, oral English plays an important part in communicating with foreigners. Also, as one of the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), oral English teaching has been paid much attention to by many experts and researchers.Nowadays, however, oral English teaching has not been given enough time and activities in English classes because of the practical reasons. Practice of listening, reading and writing in English is more given attention than speaking, which suggests that the instructors of English in class have not understood the unity of language learning processes properly.The author of the thesis made a pretest about the oral English conditions of the students in A Middle School, Grade One. The pretest was made in the form of a questionnaire. The author found that the students'attitudes toward oral English were active. However, their ability of speaking English was not so high and their mental state of speaking was nervous and not confident. So, the author persuaded the teacher of the two classes to make an experiment of increasing chances of speaking English to see weather this way of teaching can improve the English scores of the students. And the two classes are Class Five and Six of Grade One. The author chose two other classes as comparing classes.The study began in October,2010 and lasted for more than three months. As there were no special oral English classes in this school, the author and the teacher added some English-speaking time into each kind of the classes, such as reading, listening, writing, grammar, exercise and so on. This kind of teaching did not end till the end of the semester. Before the end of the semester, the author conducted another questionnaire to see the teaching effect of the three months and found that through the new way of teaching, students increased their interests in learning English, they liked English classes better and most students think that this way of teaching can help improve their English achievements as well. And the English scores of the two experimental classes improved in the end. So, the results of the study are as follows:increasing chances for students to speak English in a senior middle school has improved the students'English scores and made students feel more confident while speaking English.