The Application Of The Activity-based Approach To The Instruction Of Oral English In Senior High Schools

Since the opening-up to the outside world, the increasing communication with the outside world has required a large number of people with a good command of English. However, The students' oral language competence can' t keep up with the rapid development of our society now. Traditional methods in teaching oral English need improving .The purpose of this paper is to find a good and practical approach for spoken language teaching. The Activity-based Approach offers us an unlimited realm of options for encouraging students to involve in more oral activities as well as enhancing students'speaking ability.This paper explores the functions performed by the activity-based approach in the teaching of oral English by means of literature, comparison and experiments. First, the author elaborates not only the necessity of applying the Activity-based Approach to the teaching of oral English and its relevant theoretical bases but also its major characteristics. Then the author presents some principles for designing class activities and a teaching model with characteristics of its own, i.e. pre-class activity→while-class activity→post-class activity→assessment. After that, the author makes a comparison between the activity-based approach and the traditional one by means of a case study. Finally, on the basis of a series of experiments and questionnaires, the author comes to the conclusion that the activity-based approach is in accordance with the communicative nature of language learning and it can stimulate the students' learning interest so as to improve their oral English ability effectively.