The Effects Of Formulaic Speech On Junior Middle School Students' Class Oral English

Nowadays, English is widely used between teachers and students to communicate in junior middle school students'English class. So, students'class oral English will affect the their learning outcomes. The accuracy, fluency and idiomaticity of class oral English will help students overcome the language obstacles, enhance students'confidence and eventually realize the aim of class teaching. However, at present the new Grade One students who graduated from primary school are not taught to use class oral English when they were in primary school English class because their English teachers mainly use Chinese to teach them. For this reason,these new junior middle school students don't know how to express themselves with class oral English in their new English class. Therefore, how to help students get rid of this difficulty and grasp the class oral English as soon as possible is the first and most important step for junior middle school teachers.It is universally believed that the fluent and idiomatic control of a language rests to a considerable extent on knowledge of a body of sentence stems which are institutionalized or lexicalized and the theory of formulaic speech provides a partial basis for this nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. Learners have to access to numerous formulaic speech to refer to standard phenomena in a speech community.It is hypothesized that junior middle school students'class oral English can be improved by learning the use of formulaic speech. In Dalian No.37 Middle School, the author randomly selected two intact classes for one level of Grade One students,who were just graduated from primary school. Class 4 (42 students: 20 boys & 22 girls) is in an experimental group. Class 8 (42 students: 23 boys & 19 girls) is in a control group. The two groups were measured the class oral English ability before and after the treatment. During the experiment from September to December , 2006, the experimental group was taught to use the formulaic speech to grasp class oral English while control group was not. The hypothesis is verified by a 3-month classroom teaching the use of formulaic speech. The experimental group is much better than the control group at the accuracy, fluency and idiomaticity of class oral English expression.