An Investigation Into The Current Situation Of Students’ Oral English Competence In Rural Senior High School

The English Curriculum Standard enacted in2001specifies the requirements of thefour basic skills---listening, speaking, reading and writing for senior high school students.According to this new English Curriculum Standard, English teaching of senior high schoolshould aim at cultivating students’ competence of appropriate cummunication. However, thecultivation of students’ speaking competence in English teaching in senior high school haslargely been ignored and this is especially true in rural senior high schools. These schoolsusually don’t offer specialized oral English courses, and oral English learning is muchoverlooked by teachers and students. They have seemed to only pay attention to the teachingof reading and writing, believing that the purpose of learning English is only for the nationalentrance exam. As we all know, the ultimate goal of learning a language is to communicatewith others. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the oral English competence of thestudents in rural senior high schools and help them improve their oral English competence.This study, mainly based on the framework of PETS2, gave an oral English test to96students selected from two natural classes of Grade Two in a rural senior high school of atown in Weifang. The test mainly includes three aspects: pronunciation and intonation;grammar and vocabulary; interactive communication competence. The data obtained isanalyzed by SPSS software, and the result is as follows: the average score of students’ over-alloral English competence was2.505, which was below the passing score---3points; theaverage score in pronunciation and intonation was2.61; the average score in grammar andvocabulary was2.275and the average score in interactive communication competence was2.41. Obviously each score was pretty low. Then based on the results of the test, the authoranalyzes the major problems in students’oral English and their influence on the students’speaking competence. At last the author puts forward some suggestions on how to improvestudents’ oral English competence, with the hope that the suggestions will play an active rolein oral English teaching.