A Study On Influence Of Different Seat Arrangements On Students’ Oral Participation In College English Class

In college English class, students’ oral participation is crucial to their language learning and acquisition. More participation in the class and interaction with teachers and classmates, better communicative skills will they get. Besides, increasing students’ oral participation is also one of the most important ways to improve their oral communicative ability. Thus, English educators in China have made great efforts in revising teaching methodology and ideas and changing classroom physical environment in order to encourage more students to actively participate in college English class. As to the change in physical environment inside classroom, some educators have put forward the ideal of changing seat arrangement, trying to narrow the intercourse distance between students and teacher to increase students’ participation. Therefore, there is a new type of seat arrangement—group seat arrangement in some Chinese universities which is quite different from traditional row-and-column seat arrangement. But compared with traditional row-and-column arrangement, whether this type of new seating arrangement has positive influence on students’ classroom participation improvement in college English class?To answer the question and give suggestions for improving students’ participation from the perspective of classroom physical condition, this research takes Chongqing University as an example, and analyzes students’ participation in group seat arrangement and traditional row-and-column from quantity, quality and enthusiasm of oral participation. The methodology of this research includes video observation, teacher interview and students questionnaire. The transcript of video is mainly used for discourse analysis. Results show that students in new group seating arrangement have performed better than those who are in traditional row-and –column seat arrangement in the quantity, quality and enthusiasm of class participation, which is reflected in more times of participation, more language output, more engagement in complicated conversational structure and more active participation. Thus, this research draws the conclusion that new group seat arrangement has positive influence on improving students’ oral participation in the class, and we can choose group seat arrangement to improve students’ oral participation in college English class.