The Effects Of Flexible Learner Self-determinative Activities On Chinese EFL Learners’ Engagement And Oral Proficiency

For decades, both college teachers and students have attached much attentionto the development of English Oral Proficiency (OP). The current research choosesa new perspective which focuses on the effects of self-determinative activities onstudents’ classroom engagement and students’ oral proficiency. The purpose of thispaper is to apply flexible learner self-determinative activities to college oral Englishclassroom in China in order to find out if it can increase students’ classroomengagement as well as promote their oral English proficiency. Based onself-determinative theory (SDT) and students’ engagement theory (SET), this studyconducted an empirical study, focusing on the relationship among students’self-determinative activities, students’ classroom engagement and their oralproficiency will be discussed.The subjects are92International Economics and Trade majors enrolled atTextile and Garment College of Guangzhou University. The instruments are asemi-structured interview (based on NSSE), a questionnaire (based on SDT andCCSSE) and Oral Proficiency Tests. The research lasted sixteen weeks and theexperiment was administered to Class1(the experimental group), with Class2asthe control group.Before the experiment, a semi-structured was conducted to both two groupsand to gain information about current Chinese students’ attitudes towards theirengagement in oral English class. At the same time, a questionnaire wasadministered to all the92participants to investigate current Chinese students’engagement in oral English class. Besides, the results of the pre-test of oralproficiency from both groups were adopted. During the experiment, Class1wasgiven the full freedom to choose the order of topics listed in the textbook. What’smore, various oral activities were conducted during the sixteen weeks. Besides, allthe activities were processed on the basis of SDT. After the experiment, the same questionnaire was re-administered to all the participants in both classes and theresults of the post-test of oral proficiency from both groups were adopted.The findings show that though there is a relative low engagement with fewself-determinative oral activities conducted in current oral English classroom, moststudents are willing to enhance their oral engagement level by participating in moreself-determinative activities. What’s more, the results of pre and post questionnairereveal that the learner self-determinative activities do lead to higher degree ofstudents’ engagement in the experimental class, At last, the results of pre and postoral proficiency tests manifest that the increase of students’ classroom engagementdo promote their oral English proficiency. To be specific, accuracy and fluency havebeen improved, while complexity, as another aspect of oral proficiency, has notachieved significant progress.The result of the current research revealed and demonstrated the vital role ofself-determinative activities.