An Empirical Study On Improving College Students’ Oral English Communicative Competence Through Increasing Language Input

Language is an instrument for human communication, and the ultimate goal oflanguage teaching is to cultivate students’ ability to exchange information andexpress ideas. In College English teaching, however, it has been found that linguisticknowledge is over-emphasized while the communicative competence, especially theoral communicative competence is ignored. To improve the college English teachingand promote non-English students’ oral communicative competence, the authorconducted an experiment, hoping to find a more productive way to help Chinesestudents improve their oral competence in English learning.Taking the Krashen’s input hypothesis as theoretical basis andinput-enhancement teaching model as a way to increase students’ oral competence,this study intends to develop the non-English majors’ oral output by providingstudents with sufficient input. It is hoped that this input can reinforce students’intake and improve their oral communicative competence. The research attempted toanswer the following questions:1) Can students’ oral English communicativecompetence be improved when they are provided with a large amount ofcomprehensible input?2) What are the students’ attitudes towards the role of inputin the second language learning, especially in oral English learning? The subjects ofthe research were90English majors from two classes in JiangXi Normal University.One group was regarded as the experimental class and the other as the control class.The experimental class received the input-enhancement teaching method, and thecontrol class was taught by the traditional methods. Both qualitative and quantitativedata were collected through questionnaire, pre-test and post-test, interview, and thenSPSS16.0software was utilized to analyze the collected data.The result reveals that there is a significant difference in students’ oral Englishcommunicative competence between the experiment class and the control class. Theexperiment class is apparently superior in the improvement of their oral performanceto the control class. The input-based teaching method effectively promotes the inputand output in foreign language learning and improves students’ ability tocommunicate. The results of questionnaires also suggested a tendency that most ofthe subjects from experimental group favored the role of input to develop anall-round competence in oral proficiency. On the basis of the findings above, the author proposed some teachingimplications for oral English teaching. Firstly, it is suggested that theinput-enhancement method should be implemented in spoken English class, teachersshould provide a large amount of comprehensible input in classroom and encouragestudents to take part in all the possible activities. Secondly, some extra-curriculummaterials should be carefully selected and prepared for the students to meet theirdemand to receive more input. In quantity, the input materials should be sufficientbut not overwhelming. In quality, the materials should be authentic and related tocurrent situation, or interests of the students. Finally, teachers should design variousoral activities to promote the two-way communication to create comprehensibleinput and maximize learner’s opportunities to practice their spoken English.