Language Output And Spoken English Teaching

The thesis aims at investigating and expounding the effects of oral output on second language acquisition and making attempts on finding out an effective way to facilitate oral output and improve the quality of foreign language learning and teaching of the nation wide.Under the influence of Krashen's Input Theories, language input has become the focus of SLA studies, attracting the attention of many linguists and educators. However, the role of output is neglected or minimized. Since the mid-1980s, researchers and scholars have undertaken to realize the importance of language output. The Comprehensible Output Hypothesis proposed by Merill Swain has been regarded as a typical representation of fields of researches and studies. He claims that comprehensible input, although invaluable to the acquisition process, is not sufficient for learners to fully develop their language proficiency. In order to have a mastery of a language, both comprehensible input and comprehensible output are indispensable and necessary. In the meantime, output plays an important role in promoting SLA.On the basis of these output studies, this thesis attempts to clarify the functions of output in SLA. Output can enhance learners' accuracy as well as fluency, featuring four important functions in the language learning process: the noticing function, the hypothesis-testing function, the metalinguistic function and developing automaticity function. Later, Gass (1997)and Skehan (1998)present more ways in which output boosts language development, namely, feedback provision, better input generation, discourse skills cultivation and a personal voice development. Also, output is about to develop learners' abilities of thinking and learning strategies and facilitate the development of procedural knowledge and syntactic structure.Probing into the relationship between oral output and foreign language learning in the Chinese context, this thesis has made the research experiment on the basis of the western scholars' research references, with the objective of surveying the effects of oral output on the learning of target form of language. The results of this study have demonstrated that oral output has indeed resulted in the facilitative effect on language learning.In the light of these studies, three pedagogical implications are acquired. Firstly, the traditional viewpoints should be transformed. Teachers should provide students with more opportunities of having the oral output. Secondly, the present teaching evaluation standard ought to be improved. The backwash effect of language testing should be fully utilized. In the end, the traditional teaching model is supposed to be altered. Teachers can apply interactive teaching methods in provoking the students' initiative with participation in the oral output activities in class.