A Survey On College Students’ Oral English Teaching Mode

In China, college English teachers often put emphasis on listening, reading andwriting to ensure that students could pass the examinations of CET4and CET6. Asfor this, oral English teaching is often ignored by teachers. What’s more, oral Englishteaching in China for a long time has adopted the traditional model that the teacher isthe absolute center in the class. English teaching activity in traditional mode is verymonotonous, only input and accept are included. Teachers often put emphasis ongrammar and sentence structure analysis. During the whole class, students are passiveto accept these arcane language input and it is difficult to get the opportunity toactually use the language. It leads to an embarrassing situation that students can noteven say a complete English sentence when they communicate with native speakers.It definitely hinders the improvement of spoken English. Based on the features of oralEnglish, the author makes a systematic analysis about the problems existed in collegestudents’ oral English. To solve this embarrassing situation, the author proposed a newteaching method which is a combination of Krashen’s input hypothesis and Swain’soutput hypothesis，that is, situational communicative teaching method. In this method,the author stresses on the dominance of students in the class, while the teacher is onlya helper for students to build the platform. Some much more realistic situations areprovided for students to stimulate their interests in oral English learning. In addition,the teacher often encourages students to practice oral English as much as possible.Facts prove that this new model is helpful to improve students’ oral competence.In this research,60participants are chosen from Hebei United University andall participants are EFL learners with an average age of22. They have alreadyreceived formal English education at least9years and all of them have passed the examination of CET4. The research began from September2013to December2013.First of all,60participants are divided into two classes randomly. One is theexperiment class and the other is the control class. Two totally different methods areadopted by the author. In experiment class, the author applies a communicative modelwhich combines the input and output practice. The author pays more attention to keepthe authenticity of comprehensible inputs. At the same time, students are providedwith sufficient input materials. The author also adopts kinds of activities to promotestudents’ interests to oral English learning, such as dialogue, group discussion androle play... What’s more, the author insists on student-oriented instruction inexperiment class. It encourages students to overcome the psychological barriers topractice oral English. Some constructive opinions are suggested by the authoraccording to students’ outputs. In that way, students have gained an achievement inoral English learning. On the contrary, traditional teaching model is applied in thecontrol class and the teacher is the absolute center. Most of input materials providedto students are grammar explanations and syntactic analysis. The majority of materialscome from textbooks. Repeat reading is the main means for students to practice oraloutput. Students can hardly get an opportunity to practice oral outputs due to thelimited time of a class. Based on the input and output hypothesis theory, the authoruses quantitative and qualitative method analysis the data. It finds out the problemsexisted in students’ oral English and made an objective evaluation by advantage of thequestionnaire, two tests and an interview. After a training period, the author finds thatstudents score from experiment class is much higher than before and the mean ofcontrol class is lower than experiment class. It indicates that the new teaching methodis superior to the traditional teaching model from the aspect of improving students’oral English competence.The author has got some pedagogical implications on oral English teaching byanalyzing this research. From the perspective of teacher, first, teachers have to changethe old ideas that educational means serve examinations. Second, the transition fromteacher-oriented to student-oriented is urgent, that is to say, teachers should respectthe student’s role in class. Third, teachers should ensure that the input given to students must be comprehensible and reliable. Forth, teachers have a responsible toencourage students to give more oral outputs. Fifth, some high-tech medium shouldbe used by teachers in oral class teaching to meet modern requirements. From theperspective of students, firstly, language learners should possess identification abilityto distinguish which materials are authentic and reliable. Secondly, students shouldremember that listening and speaking depend on each other for existence. Thirdly,students should make full use of after-class time to practice their oral English. At last,students must undertake a self-reflection process in oral English learning. Thisresearch is only a tentative research due to the limitation of the author’s knowledgeand ability. Some future research should be done to inspect the current situation ofstudents’ oral competence and researchers should think of more efficient ways toimprove students’ oral competence.