On The Application Of "information Gap" Principle In Teaching Spoken English For English Majors

Based on the“Information-gap”(IG) principle, the experimental method isemployed in this thesis to explore the effectiveness of the Communicative LanguageTeaching (CLT) in the English major’s oral English class for the improvement ofspoken English.As is known to us all, language is the vehicle for human communication. Thegoal of English language teaching is considered to enable learners to use English inways which are communicatively effective and appropriate, that is, to gaincommunicative competence. Among the Basic English skills, spoken English is theimportant symbol of language output. However, the teaching of spoken English is farfrom being satisfactory. From primary school to high school, spoken English hasnever been paid too much attention, which directly leads to English Majors’poorperformance in spoken English after the university enrollment and should beimproved with great efforts. Over the years, great achievements have been obtainedon cultivating the students’abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing byadopting traditional English teaching approaches. However, facts have shown thatthese approaches are obviously lack of credibility and efficiency, which are notsuitable for oral English practice, which aims at improving the students’oral Englishskill. Therefore, it’s absolutely essential to research how to improve students’oralability by constant and effective practice.The IG Principle is one of the most basic principles in CommunicativeLanguage Teaching (CLT), which has become the main concern of English teachersand researchers. Arguably, language communication is established on the basis of theinformation gap. That is to say, in the English language teaching, if there is noinformation gap, there’s no real communication. Having reviewed the theoreticalfoundations and the related studies of information gap, the author employsinformation-gap principle in oral English teaching and explores the feasibility andeffectiveness of information gap principle in oral English class. In this thesis an empirical study is carried out. Fifty-four freshmen of English major participate in theresearch. Two parallel classes were randomly divided into an experimental class and acontrol class. During the empirical study which lasted about 15 weeks, the authorcarries out teaching activities involving a series of information-gap tasks in theexperimental class while adopts traditional teaching methods in the control class. Theresearcher applied SPSS15.0, by means of tests, interviews, and questionnaires forgathering the data. Finally, some results were got after the analysis of these data in aqualitative and quantitative way. The results indicate that it is feasible to improve thestudents’spoken English by applying information gap principle in oral Englishteaching. The students could make great progress in terms of oral ability.Improvement in fluency and accuracy is obvious. The results also show that thismodel of teaching can motivate the students in language learning.The thesis consists of three parts，which is organized in the following way:Part One is the preface. This part gives a brief description about the history of thestudy of spoken language teaching and the current situation of IG research at homeand abroad.Part Two is the body, which divides into three chapters. Chapter One is thetheoretical discussion, which introduces some theories related to the spoken languageteaching and learning and displays the basic theory of“Information”and“Information-gap”Principle. Its theoretical basis is discussed in detail here. ChapterTwo concerns the research, which provides detailed descriptions of the methodologyof this thesis, including the purpose, the subjects concerned, the instruments employed,the procedures for data collection and data analysis, the results of this research anddiscussions along with the reporting in great detail. Chapter Three concentrates on thespecific application of IG principle in teaching spoken English for English majors, inwhich we discusses the transfers of the teacher and the students from differentperspectives. It is suggested that it is quite necessary to apply information-gapprinciple in oral English class and the students will be sure to benefit a lot from it.Part Three is the concluding part. It first makes a conclusion about the research and then summarizes the major findings. Finally, the limitations of the present studyand suggestions for future research are summarized.