A Study Of Oral English Teaching Problems And Countermeasures At Junior Middle School

In the 21st century, facing with cultural diversity, economic integration andlifelong-education, English as an international common communication tool has beenwidely used. More and more schools and parents have paid attention to Englishspoken ability. The time at junior middle school is the foundation stage of Englishlearning and also is the critical period of cultivating students’ abilities in listening,speaking, reading and writing. With China contacting other countries more and morefrequently, cultivating English spoken ability in basic education becomes more andmore important.In the teaching, the author also attached importance to students’ oral Englishexpression and communication ability. However at a junior middle school of Jinancity where the author taught, the effect of oral English teaching was not obvious. InSeptember of 2010, the author greeted two classes of new students in Grade Seven.Through one semester’s observation, the author found that they generally held poororal English levels. The author’s school is located in urban-rural combined zone andthe primary schools around it with uneven English teaching levels. The students’English performance had large difference after entering the middle school. The timein Grade Seven is the foundation stage of cultivating English spoken ability, but ourstudents generally held poor levels. Every one of our teachers must face this reality.The research purpose is "How to improve students’ English spoken ability at theurban-rural junior middle school".In China, linguists and foreign language teachers have done a lot of research onoral language teaching and learning at middle school, but these studies mainly basedon students’ oral language learning. The study of unifying the investigation into theteacher’s teaching and the students’ learning and targeted proposing thecountermeasures was less. In the thesis, the author firstly introduced the basic concepts of spoken English,spoken ability and teaching strategy, new curriculum standards’ requirement for theoral teaching and compared the oral English teaching characteristics at primary andjunior middle school. Inspired by the fruitful research results in China and abroad, theauthor tried to fully understand the oral English learning problems among juniormiddle school students in order to further train students’oral English communicationability. Secondly based on putting forward research hypotheses, the author used oraltest, interview, questionnaire and classroom observation to master the situation of oralEnglish learning and teaching at school and got the first-hand information. Dataanalysis showed that many factors led to students’ oral English ability generally poor.There were students’ own factors, teachers’ and teaching process factors, and oralEnglish teaching and learning problems also presented in different aspects. The authormade the detailed analysis and summary.Under the guidance of the constructivism learning theory and proximaldevelopment learning theory and with existing problems, the author attempted toapply oral English teaching countermeasures in hope of enhancing the students’ oralEnglish ability and carried out the teaching experiment. She chose Class One in GradeSeven as the experiment group (EG) and Class Two as control group (CG). In theexperiment, EG received oral English teaching countermeasures and CG was taughtunder the traditional teaching methods. The experiment lasted for one semester. Afterthe experiment, SPSS17.0 indicated that the mean scores of EG was much higher thanthe mean scores of CG. There existed significant difference between two groups.Therefore, comparing with the current traditional teaching methods, designedteaching countermeasures can improve oral English ability and oral test scores. Theauthor again carried out the questionnaire in two groups. The results showed that inexperiment group the students’interest and confidence for speaking English weresignificantly higher than students’ in control group. Therefore, comparing with thecurrent traditional teaching methods, designed teaching countermeasures can increaseinterest and confidence for speaking English. At end of thesis, on the base of the experiment, the author expounded the majorfindings and teaching implications, pointed out the research limitations and offeredsome reasonable proposals for future research.This thesis aimed to improve students’ oral English ability at junior middleschool and the author hoped to provide some theory and practice experience forEnglish teachers. We believe that improving English spoken ability at junior middleschool is the common goal of teachers and students. We will continue to study thisproblem and it will be further development.