An Investigation Of English Majors’ Classroom Participation Of Oral English Class In Vocationali Crollllege

In our country, EFL classroom is the main place of language acquisition. In theclass, students’ participation is vital. It plays a decisive role to student’s achievement.For English majors in college, students’ participation has an important effect on theimprovement of their speaking ability in oral English class. However, in Chinese oralEnglish classroom, students’ silence and passive participation is quite common. Manystudents are not willing to take part in the classroom activities. Based on this, theresearch mainly investigates students’ preferred participation behaviors in oral Englishclass and the influencing factors of classroom participation. The study explores thetwo questions in order to promote the student’s participation in the oral Englishclassroom.By using questionnaire and interview with individuals, the purpose of the paperis to probe into the following two questions:(1) What are the preferred classroomparticipation behaviors of students in oral English class?(2) What are the main factorswhich affect students’ participation in oral English class? Both of the two questionsresults were obtained from questionnaire. As qualitative data, the interview wasauxiliary to quantitative data. The participants of this study were264students, andthey are English majors from three different high vocational colleges in JiangxiProvince. There are98,90,76students from the three colleges respectively.The results of the study showed that there were several kinds students’ preferredparticipation behaviors in oral classroom, such as listening to others seriously,answering the questions together with their classmates, talking with their classmatesin English, participating in group work and practicing their spoken English in theform of dialogue. For the influencing factors of classroom participation, theuppermost factors were the students’ factors. And the second significant factors wereteachers’ factors. The influences of environmental and cultural factors were not aslarge as the former two factors. Concerning the effect of influencing factors onstudent’s participation, there were remarkable differences between the students ofhigh-willingness and the students of low-willingness. Therefore, in the learning andteaching of oral English, the teachers should be good at observing students and usingthe teaching methods that the students like. At the same time, the teachers shouldbuild a harmonious and relaxing learning environment and guide the student to participate in the classroom activities. If so, it would yield twice the result with halfthe effort.