A Frame-based Research On Primary School Students’ Oral English Teaching

The―Compulsory Education Curriculum Standards experimental teachingmaterials‖proposed that students in middle-high grade of primary school are requiredto "provide personal information using3~5independent sections on simple topics,express simple ideas and opinions, participate in the discussion, self-correctappropriately in oral expression". But during the procedure of English teaching inprimary school, especially in middle-high grade, most teachers only focus on Englishgrammar explanations and teaching, rarely on the students‘training of oral ability. Atthe same time, as the result of the limit of time, textbook arrangement etc., mostprimaryschool students‘oral English hasn’t reachedtheprescribed requirements oforalexpression. The students are asked to describe several pictures or a given topic orally in3-4-5sentences. However, some problems such as the omissions of given main points,non-fluency in oral expression and so on often occur in their oral test. Therefore, how toimprove the English oral ability of students during teaching and learning process is aproblem need to be addressing the issue.The frame theory defines a cognitive frame in terms of a remembered frameworkto be adapted to fit reality or of a network with frame components workingharmoniously together. From a frame theoretical point of view, linguistic expressionsfunction both as triggers to activate and as anchors to stabilize the cognitive frames onwhich meaning in language relies heavily for its generation (Wang Lirong,2005). Theauthor finds it possible to teach oral English of topics in a different but effective way.The study attempts to apply frame theory to oral English of topics teaching. Anexperiment has been carried out to testify whether the frame-based training of oralEnglish of topics teaching in primary school can improve students‘oral expressionability.The subjects in this study were the students in two of six randomly occurringclasses in Grade Five in Woshan primary School in Guangzhou. The author randomlytook one of them as an experimental class (EC) and the other as a control class (CC).The experiment lasted for one term. The experiment instruments are the test scores inpre-test and post-test and the sample analysis of topics recording scripts. The pre-testwas held before the experiment, two teachers gave marks to the recorded scripts, which was no significant difference of the two classes in data analyzing section. During theexperiment, the author used a traditional teaching method in CC, and adopted theframe-based method in EC to help learners grasp the semantic frame, including frameelements and frame events. Both of the classes were given same trainings exceptdifferent methods. Also, the participants were tested in the same way after training.Experimental data of this study consists of the recording the conversation and scoringthe records in two tests. Scores of students in each topic were collected and analyzed byusing the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science).The result indicates the frame-based training of the oral English education caneffectively improve the content and fluency of oral English, but it doesn‘t greatlyimprove the accuracy of oral expression. To give a macro-scope summary, it improvesthe overall oral English level and helps learners improve their oral expression ability.