A Study On The Effects Of Recitation With The Situational Context Constructed In The Mind On The Chinese College Students’ Oral English Proficiency

This thesis aims to conduct a tentative research about the style ofrecitation. The proposed style of recitation in this thesis was offeredtheoretical evidence. This thesis conducted research through experimentsabout the influence of recitation with imagined context in brain on oralproficiency. The Chinese English learners are universally not proficient in oralEnglish and one of the biggest problems for Chinese English learners is thatthey are short of language environment. This thesis conducted sometheoretical analysis about the above mentioned phenomenon. And theexperiment subjects in this thesis were college students in China.This thesis conducted research and explored the relationship betweenrecitation with the situational context constructed in brain and the oral Englishproficiency and demonstrated the related experiment conclusions.Manyresearchers have already proved that recitation is an effective way forimproving oral English proficiency. Recitation is not only language input butalso language output. For Chinese English learners, recitation is relativelyideal learning strategy, moreover, most of the recitation materials are dialogueor passages. The recitation material itself can constitute a specific context.Therefore, as the output style of language, recitation, to some degree, cansolve the problem of lacking language environment in China. The recitationwith the situational context constructed in brain facilitates the transfer inEnglish learning. Generally speaking, transfer in learning refers to theinfluence of previous learning on the subsequent learning or the influence ofacquired experiences and knowledge on the other tasks that are expected to beaccomplished. According to transfer theory, the more similarities there are inthe tasks, the easier the transfer can occur. So recitation with the situationalcontext constructed in the brain is easier to engender transfer than recitation without that, that is, the recitation with the situational context constructed inmind can, to some degree, improve the oral proficiency in real context morethan recitation without imagined context in mind.Oral language testing is one of the most important aspects in languagetesting, but it is difficult to determine the measurement standards. Theresearch adopted the three-dimension evaluating mode which was proposedby Skehan to test oral English proficiency. In Skehan s mode, oral Englishproficiency is measured from three aspects, that is, fluency, complexity andaccuracy. Since three-dimension testing mode is proposed, it enjoys muchpopularity.This research included pre-oral test, post-oral test and two questionnaires.The subjects who participated in this research were taught by the sameEnglish teacher with the same textbook and same class hours. The studentswere required to read aloud till they could recite fluently. In the process ofreading aloud and trying to recite, the students from the experimental groupwere required to construct the situational context in brain by means ofthink-aloud method, that is, they were required to describe the situationalcontext in the recited materials with language and try to construct this contextin brain by language. Whereas the students from the control group were notrequired to do so.After analyzing the collected data by statistical method, we drew theconclusion that recitation with situational context constructed in mind couldhelp improve the fluency of oral English though this type of recitation had noinfluence on the accuracy, complexity and oral English proficiency as awhole.