| The English teaching in China has focused on cultivating students’ speaking ability since the implementation of the new College English Curriculum Requirements (Department of Higher Education,2007); however, the development of students’thinking ability has not been adequately taken into consideration. Chinese college students’logic thinking ability to comprehend, analyze, synthesize, abstract, and generalize is comparatively weak, so does their creative thinking ability. The specific communicative language teaching mode assisted by multimedia was first illustrated in this thesis; the relationship between language and thought, the role of logic thinking ability in English learning process, and the previous studies related to logic thinking ability were reviewed; at last the research on Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) were sketched.The study was based on an English audio-video speaking course (EAVSC), called Situational English course, targeted at non-English major juniors at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. The students’performance on the productive activities in each class were recorded and collected. The teaching methodology was framed by Bachman’s Communicative Language Ability (CLA) theory, which emphasized students’maximal practice of the target language in authentic or nearly authentic situations. Various formats of in-class activities were contained in this course:pair-work dialogues, three-person group discussions, debates, one-minute personal statements and so forth. The class was conducted in a language lab, in which a digital learning system, WE-LL 6000 was installed in each student’s computer as well as the teacher’s. Under this learning system, students can easily be put into different pairs or groups either randomly or in set rules when finishing tasks, without changing their seats at all. The teacher can also record students’ oral productions simultaneously, which enables the teacher to track students’ gradual development on the one hand and serve as data collection for research purpose on the other hand. The subjects of this study came from different classes.30 students of empirical group were randomly selected from two independent classes attending Situational English course taught by the same instructor, and the other 30 students from various classes were chosen in the control group. In this study, the author chose the one-minute personal statement as the means to elicit subjects’ speech in the pretest and in the posttest. The data was collected with the help of the WE-LL 6000 system, and processed by Cool Edit Pro 2.0 and Microsoft Word 2007. The raw data were further computed by SPSS 17.0.This paper aims to examine how to develop EFL learners’ logic thinking ability by conducting oral productive activities—Ss/Ss (discussions within groups of 3-5 students), S-S (pair work dialogues), and S (personal statement) from a one-semester’s empirical research in an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based English audio-video speaking class (EAVSC) at the authors’ university. The students’ performance on the productive activities in each class were recorded and collected, however, the discussion of this research will mainly focus on the data from their one-minute personal statements, as well as that from the empirical group students’ pre- and post tests and the comparison between the empirical group and the control group, as well as the students’ feedback from a questionnaire.It is proved from the analyses of the above correlated data that the teaching strategy in conducting the students’ production skills in this ICT-based EAVSC has a positive effect on improving students’logic thinking ability and therefore offers valued pedagogical suggestions and implications for other EFL/ESL teachers. |
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