The Problem Of Students' Inactive Participation In The Oral English Class And Its Countermeasures

More and more linguists, language researchers and teachers have been aware of the importance of the language communicative competence since Hymes' concept of communicative competence was introduced to China in 1980s. They have come to realize that the ultimate goal of language teaching is to train students to acquire the ability to communicate and that speaking occupies an important and indispensable position among the four basic language skills-listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, for decades the greater part of the Chinese teachers have been quite used to the traditional way of teaching a foreign language, which has long been dominated by a teacher-centered, examination-oriented, grammar and vocabulary-based method. The deep-rooted ELT tradition can hardly be changed within a short time. The English most Chinese students have learned is "mute English". The reasons that particular students acquire low oral competence after years' study are no doubt various and multiple. Different researchers have different opinions about its causes. According to Penny Ur (1996:121), some of the problems in getting learners to talk in the classroom are as follows: inhibition, nothing to say, low or uneven participation and mother-tongue use. In the oral English class, the author finds the most serious problem is their inactive participation in class activities. The teacher often experiences that he/she has to keep on speaking while learners keep silent as listeners, which greatly hinders learners' development of oral competence. This paper tries to deal with the problem of learners' inactive participation in class activities. Through quantitative research, it studies the causes of the problem, analyzes its attributions and proposes some countermeasures by adopting a humanistic approach so that the problem can be dealt with sensibly so as to give back voices to inactive or silent students in the oral class.