An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Pupils' Use Of CSs And SLA Development

According to the"Fundamental Requirements of English Course Teaching in Primary School"(2001), one of the course purposes is to foster pupils'ability to hold simple conversations and therefore help them lay a solid foundation for their future study. In addition, as'mute English'phenomenon remains prevalent, more and more kids'parents focus on spoken English. For the above reasons, spoken English has been paid great attention again. Whereas anyone who has tried to communicate in an L2 knows that learners often have some difficulty in expressing themselves because of their inadequate knowledge. In order to overcome these difficulties they resort to various kinds of communication strategies, which is usually abbreviated to CSs (Ellis, 1997). To pupils, it is not enough to just ensure a successful talk by making use of CSs, what's more, it's worth helping them acquire new words and expressions. And this is just what the thesis cares.In order to test the relationship between pupils'use of CSs and SLA development, the author conducted an empirical experiment on her two classes at Chongqing Ladder English Training School, one is an elementary-level class, and the other an intermediate-level class. Pupils in the intermediate-level class have higher English proficiency than those in the elementary-level class. Firstly, the author did a survey in the form of questionnaires, and roughly knew the strategies they had used unconsciously; Correspondingly, the author carried out a three-month CSs training on the elementary-level class; At last, the author adopted SPSS 15.0 to conduct data processing, such as mean value and standard deviation, based on the oral tests materials and the survey results. The results of the comparative study indicate that students in the elementary-level class even exceeded those in the intermediate-level class at post-oral test. This research, then, further testifies that CSs training can not only increase the frequency of the pupils'conscious use of CSs, but also promote their vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, the author suggests that CSs training should be applied to routine English teaching. To do so, the pupils can enlarge their vocabulary effectively.