An Experimental Study On Junior Middle School Students’ Oral English Teaching Under The Guidance Of Frame Theory

In the past decades, in foreign language teaching, four basic skills have beengreatly improved on the part of our Chinese middle school students. However, fourskills of English in school teaching haven’t been developed evenly, speaking is stillthe most difficult skill for the majority of middle students. In spite of this, theapplication of frame theory in middle spoken English teaching can provide moreconvenience for and have good learning effects on English learners.According to frame theory, Fillmore says that frames are specific unifiedframeworks of knowledge, or coherent schematizatons of experience. And frames alsohelp to form the new cognitive structures while getting new information. Languagecomprehension depends largely on learners’ background knowledge. Therefore, frametheory plays an important role in information activation and spoken English output.On the basis of frame theory, this study aims at explore whether frame-theory-basedapproach teaching can improve junior middle students oral English competence.Focusing on frame activation, this thesis explores the possible teaching activitiesand strategies in spoken English from frame semantic perspective, including frameactivation through key words (frame elements) and background knowledge,association and analogy, and the establishment of frames. An10-week teachingexperiment has been conducted with the application of frame theory in theexperimental group with38students. Another class with38students is the controlgroup. The comparison between the pre-test data and post-test data from two groupsshows that spoken English proficiency of the experimental group has improvedapparently. It proves that the frame-theory-based approach teaching is feasible andeffective in spoken English teaching. Frame theory, with its feasibility andeffectiveness, has broken through some traditional views on the theoretical andpractical nature of speaking and gave off new lights on the teaching and learning ofEFL speaking.