The Application Of Involvement Load Hypothesis In College Oral English Class

As the development of Chinese economy, the social requirement to students’ English communicative ability has greatly increased. As a result, English speaking ability has aroused more and more attention. However, Chinese students are weak in speaking English; they are not confident enough to speak, or the sentences they make usually have mistakes or fail to express themselves. Many researches have showed that this phenomenon is because of a shortage of practice, a lack of vocabulary, or unskillful use of frequently-used expressions. Obviously, to improve oral English, students must firstly improve their vocabulary learning.The thesis tries to use the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer and Hulstijn as the theoretical framework, and use the task-based teaching to guide the study. It investigates how to improve students’oral English skills by learning high-frequency words. In the study, according to the three elements---need, search and evaluation of Involvement Load Hypothesis, the teacher designed various tasks with different involvement loads and types, combining the vocabulary learning with oral English practice. It is hoped that a more effective way of acquiring vocabulary could be developed so that students will change the current situation of "dumb English".The subjects of this study are64freshmen from two intact classes of Public Health School in Zhengzhou University. Through comparing the scores of pre-test and post test, observing students’classroom performance, and analyzing the results of two questionnaires, the teacher tested the feasibility of improving students’oral English skills by applying Involvement Load Hypothesis to learning high-frequency words. At the same time, the thesis also investigates how to design various tasks to enrich the classroom activities, promote students’learning motivation and strengthen the learning effects under the guidance of task-based teaching.The research findings will be beneficial to improve the oral English teaching for Chinese English teachers, and provide some learning techniques to improve oral English for students.