An Action Research On Oral Errors In College English Classroom

Action research appeared in the U.S. first and was used to study minority issuesand later used in industrial training. In the early1950s, Stephen Corey applied actionresearch to teaching field and encouraged teachers to use action research to improveteaching. According to Kemmis&Taggart’s idea, action research is a form ofself-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social (including educational)situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of (a) their own social oreducational practices,(b) their understanding of these practices, and(c) the situations(and institutions) in which these practices are carried outIn action research, being designers, implementers and evaluators, teachersshould do systematic observation and continual self-reflections to discover problemsabout teaching ideas, methods, and outcomes and determine the proper ways to solveproblems occurring in the classroom. During the process of resolving these problems,teachers are able to examine data, to analyze outcomes, to discover new problems, andto allow for the logical development of action research, which in turn leads toimprovements in teaching methods, enhancement of teaching results, and expansion ofteachers’ knowledge.Seven years of teaching experience and numerous classroom observation showthat college students often make oral errors repeatedly in English classes although theyare active in performance. The analysis of the questionnaire reveals the students’ poorself-evaluation of their English learning and their weak self-correction awareness of oralerrors. Moreover, the students tend to rely on teachers to improve their Englishproficiency. All these remind the author of this dissertation to adopt certain teachingstrategies to change the status.Eighty four freshmen from Engineering and Technology College, HBUT arechosen as the research subjects. Based on the first-hand data (frequently occurred oralerrors which are collected by the author in her teaching practice), an oral English testpaper is designed and applied in both the pre-test and the post-test to obtain a generalidea of what kind of errors are more likely to commit. In addition to the written pre-test,there is an oral pre-test which is recorded by recording pen and transcripted into27952 words, then312oral errors are identified. The analysis shows linguistic errors are moreprominent than pragmatic ones and form78.2%of all oral errors. In all errors,34.6%ofthem belong to grammatical type. In order to help the subjects to reduce their oral errors,the author adopts task-based language teaching method in her practice.10weeks later apost-test is organized, and the test results tell the occurrences of students’ oral errorsdecrease greatly. According to the post-recording which has been transferred into120minutes recording,24098words data contains211errors and25.1%of them aregrammatical errors. The research result proves the efficiency of this action research withthe decline of grammatical error.The research target is students’ oral errors, which can be improved by grouplearning. It’s believed that action research is problem-solving and the researcher designsan action research and a series of tasks in or out of the classroom. Within the10-weekaction research, the result of questionnaires, pre-test and post-test are analyzed and thefindings are concluded as follows:1. Chinese students can reduce common oral errorsespecially grammatical errors effectively if provided with daily tasks to practice oralEnglish in and out of class.2. The application of action research is important forteachers’ professional improvement and can help the teacher to settle the problemsduring the teaching practice. However, the action research is carried out within84subjects and small amount of data, the result may be representative but notcomprehensive.