Application Of Context To Oral English Teaching In College

As we all know, oral English is an essential factor in a foreign language learner’s overall language ability. Since the new "College English curriculum requirements" was published, English communicative ability was promoted to unprecedented heights. Through my ten years of English teaching, I have lots of harvest and enlightenment, as well as confusion. As with all the college English teachers, I am facing many difficult problems, especially problems about oral English teaching. In the traditional teaching mode, teachers play the "leaders" role, instead of "guider and helper". The lack of language environment leads directly to the students’low interest in expressing themselves. As a result, many students fail in communication, even in expressing themselves fluently. The "dumb English" phenomenon formed. In the view of above situation, the author explores the effective ways to improve students’oral expressing ability to improve teaching methods and arouse students’interest in communication.In linguistics, context is a very important concept. Context is an important factor in understanding and using the language, which is the medium of communication. The language can realize its meaning and function only in real communication, and the communication is always in a certain context. Therefore, the correct understanding and using of language is the main factor in the realization of language function. The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to enable learners to master the language knowledge and use it appropriately and freely in daily communication. In view of this, this paper believes that the master and proper use of context must play a positive role in oral English teaching. This paper is based on the contextual knowledge and theory. The context is classified into two kinds, one is the linguistic context, the other is the non-linguistic context, which includes situational context and cultural context. By the research of context theory and its application in college oral English teaching, this paper explores whether context teaching methods can inspire students’learning interest, so that their English communicative ability can be improved.This research takes two classes from non-English majors in Inner Mongolia University Manzhouli College as experimental subjects. The traditional oral English teaching methods are used in the control class, while the contextual teaching methods is adopted in experimental class. In order to guarantee the credibility of the collected data, spoken English texts have been done both at the very beginning and at the end of the experiment. According to the data, there aren’t much differences between them before the experiment, on the contrary to the significant differences after the experiment. By nearly one semester’s training, students in the experiment class are more interested in speaking practice and participate more positively. The research shows that the application of context theory in oral English teaching has a significant effect on the improvement of non-English majors’ spoken English.The paper includes five parts. The first part presents the theory of context and its relationship with oral English teaching, which provides the theoretical basis and theoretical framework for thesis writing. The second part concerns about the teaching method, principles and procedures of the application of the context theory. The third part introduces the teaching experiment of oral English under the frame of context theory. The fourth part presents the research method of a questionnaire survey and oral test. The fifth chapter presents the data analysis and discussion about questionnaire survey and oral test. The sixth part is the conclusion.