An Empirical Study Of Senior Middle School Students' Inactive Participation In Oral English Class And Its Countermeasures

Communication is the main purpose of learning language. Course Criteria for General Senior High School English (2003)points out that high school English teaching "needs to pay special attention to raising students' ability to carry on thinking and expressing in English" (中华人民共和国教育部, 2003: 8) and makes it clear that "the purpose of English study is communication and expression." (ibid: 18) With the constant deepenning of reform and opening, especially after China joins WTO, the exchanges between our country and other countries all over the world are frequent day by day. As an international language communication tool, English has been widely used; English oral ability appears especially important in modern society. To prepare for tomorrow's world, students should have a good command of communication skills. However, our investigation indicates that most students are rather weak in their communicative skills; they may lack enough courage to open their mouths or stumble when they speak. Reasons why particular students acquire low oral competence after years of study are no doubt various and multiple. This paper attempts to investigate one of them—learners' inactive participation in oral class, and tries to solve the problem.After a general survey of domestic and foreign studies on the teaching of oral English, the author finds that most of them have focused on how to teach oral English, with very few dealing with the oral English class of high school (Special oral class was not offered in China until 2003). Some scholars have studied students' passive participation in oral English class at the vocational school level, but few of them have done experimental researches. This research will prove its feasibility and validity in terms of theory and empirical research. Through the investigation and the empirical research, the author finds that the situation of students' inactive participation in oral English class is serious. In order to solve this problem, the author has adopted a "Six-step Mode". Through an empirical research which lasted for a semester, it has proved that the present mode can solve high school students' inactive participation in oral English class.