On English Majors’ Expectations And Perceptions Of Native English Teachers’ Speaking Activities In Oral English Classes

Facing the contemporary human-oriented oral English teaching trend, we paymore attention to language learners’ emotional demand. We seriously investigatestudents’ inner emotion, their thoughts and their real feelings about certain courseoffered, so as to better implement student-centered education thoughts.Increasing social demand for learning, timely change on foreign languageteaching reform and students’ active learning desire extremely inspire oral Englishteaching development. Meanwhile, language teaching staffs are forced to be facedwith actual weakness and defect on professional oral English teaching, shown on theshortage of native English teachers, heavy teaching load and inadequate oral Englishlessons. What’s more, a large amount of English-major students are incapable tospeak English fluently as expected while their current oral proficiency is far fromenough to handle social works or to satisfy further study need latterly. That is why itbecomes a great urgency to make teaching objective and scheme from students’perspective thereby effectively improving English-major students’ oral competence.In China, most universities hire native English teachers for English-major students inoral class while speaking activities are typically regarded as their main teaching form.Therefore, it is of absolute need and great significance to have study on speakingactivities taken by native English teachers.According to the theoretical framework of needs analysis, this paper focuses onthe investigation of English-major students’ expectations and perceptions ofspeaking activities taken by native English teachers in oral class. Related data arecollected in by instruments like questionnaire survey and interview with285sophomores majored in English from four universities in Hebei. The research aims toknow students’ expectations and perceptions of speaking activities organized bynative English teachers from three aspects which are the types, the characteristicsand the organizations of speaking activities.The major findings include three aspects:(1) as to types of speaking activities: native English teachers are expected to lay more emphasis on pre-communicativeactivities and information-gap activities.(2) As to characteristics of speakingactivities: students hope to be provided equal opportunity talking in English tomaximally promote individual oral capability.(3) As to organizations of speakingactivities: Specifically, students are better divided in groups according to theirdifferent language levels; otherwise students may be discouraged with lessenthusiasm. In addition, native English teachers’ response to students’ action inspeaking activities needs to intensify.Finally, based on the research results mentioned above, this paper proposesfollowing pedagogical implications. Firstly, native English teachers should concernmore about pre-communicative and information-gap activities. Secondly, no learningdiscrimination means every single student can speak English impartially in oral class.Thirdly, native English teachers need to provide useful feedback to students timely inregards to their language expression and divide groups in consideration of students’personal features.