| The goal of English teaching in high schools of China is to help students develop comprehensive skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, in practice, the teaching of listening and speaking has been widely ignored, resulting in the fact that students’ abilities of listening and speaking are lagging far behind those of reading and writing. It is a problem commonly observed and needs addressing immediately.Based on Input and Output Theory, this paper is exploring a possible mode of English teaching of listening and speaking in high school English classrooms. Specifically, the study introduced speech training into class teaching, and the speech topics were in accordance with the topics in the designated textbooks. The training experiment, which lasted one semester, took the Second Language Acquisition Mode created by Gass as its first model, and as its subjects, six classes of students selected from the Senior One of a four-star high school in Jianfsu Province. The study collected its data by means of tests, interviews and classroom observations and the data analysis showed that, when high school listening and speaking teaching was conducted in the form of topical speeches training,(1) it raised students’ awareness of language output;(2) it improved students’listening and speaking abilities;(3) it helped to develop students’ comprehensive linguistic skills; and (4) the Gass Model, if appropiatedly adapted, worked well as a teaching model that could be employed in the classroom to effectively organise the teaching of listening and speaking.The research, once again, verifies the effectiveness of the Input and Output Theory in actual language classrooms. The particular proof is that language output in the form of tropical speeches does drive students to acquire more and produce more. Hopefully, the classroom training model generated in this study will contribute to today’s high school English teaching, and serve as a reference for similar future researches as well. |
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