An Empirical Study Of Context-based Teaching On Senior High School Students’ Oral English

With increasing exchange with foreign countries, English as an internationallanguage is getting more and more attention of people from all walks of life, andspoken language as the carrier of oral communication, is an important part oflanguage competence. In2009, Guangdong added oral test to college entranceexamination. Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanghai and other coastal provinces and cities alsotake the same practice. However, students‘oral competence is still not satisfying. Theauthor believes that an important reason for the deficiency of oral competence of highschool students is the ignorance of the role of context in oral English teaching, whichbuilds an unbridgeable psychological chasm. Language as a communication carrier isproduced in the specific context of social interaction. Consequently, it is possible toinfer that context-based teaching approach will be conducive to the improvement ofstudents’ oral competence.Based on the study of context theory, the author attempts to explore the influenceof context-based teaching approach on students‘oral teaching in senior high schoolthrough experiment (questionnaire survey and empirical research). In order to achievethe goal, the following two specific questions will be addressed:1) What effects doesthe context-based teaching approach have on senior high school students‘oralcompetence?2) Can context-based oral English teaching approach benefit students indeveloping empathy ability, reducing anxiety and improving learning strategy?Two oral tests and a questionnaire are employed in the study. Oral tests are fromthe King of English Listening and Speaking Test published by Beijing CLP electronicpublishing house. And the questionnaire is a combination of Jollife‘s Basic EmpathyScale (BES), Horwitz‘s Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) andOxford‘s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). The subjects are60students from two classes in senior one of Dongpu Middle School, an ordinary schoolin Heyuan city, Guangdong province. At the beginning of the experiment, the teacherconducts oral pre-test and questionnaire pre-test in the two classes to find out whether there is significant difference in oral competence and students‘empathy, anxiety,learning strategy between the two classes. In4-month experiment, the teacheremploys two different teaching approaches--context-based approach and traditionalapproach. At the end of the experiment, the teacher performs the oral post-test andquestionnaire post-test. Oral tests are used to measure students‘oral competence andthe questionnaire is for investigating their conditions in empathy, anxiety and learningstrategy. Both the pre-test and post-test of oral English and questionnaire arecontrastively analyzed by SPSS.The experiment result shows:1) Compared with the traditional approach, thecontext-based teaching approach is more effective.2) Context-based approach canbetter enhance student‘s empathy ability, reduce their anxiety, and improve learningstrategy. However, limitations can also be found in the experiment due to the author‘slimited theoretical knowledge and operant ability in teaching. Further studies on theapplication of context-based approach are still needed.