A Study On Strategies For Promoting Junior Middle School Students’ Oral English Ability

Since the Opening and Reforming policy in China, English has been playing avery important part in every stage of people’s life. Parents, teachers and students spendvery long time and a lot of energy in learning English. However, people just put theireyes on the test scores and ignore the importance of oral English. Many of them, whenencounter communication in real life, though they have very high test scores, cannot saya sentence with confidence. With the carrying out of the essential-qualities-orientededucation and the publishing of the New National English Curriculum,students-centered classroom cannot exist without students’ oral English ability. Thus, toimprove junior middle school students’ oral English not only realizes the meaning ofEnglish as a communicative tool, but also becomes a requirement of the New EnglishCurriculum. As an English teacher in junior middle, the author of this thesis feels thenecessity to go on with study and try to find out the strategies from the linguisticstheories and educational theories.The improvement of oral English lies on the basis of large quantities ofcomprehensible input. Therefore, this thesis begins with Krashen’s Input Hypothesisand Swain’s Output Hypothesis. According to Input Hypothesis, the input materialsmust be comprehensible, interesting and a little higher above the present level of thelearners. Swain thinks comprehensible output, on the other hand can make languageacquisition succeed. The founding of Gardner’s Multi-intelligence Theory has changedthe western primary school and middle school education in the last few years. Educators do not evaluate students just about the linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligencesthat have been only valued at school. The differences of students’ intelligences havebeen admitted. Educators try to help students use their better intelligence to help withthe development of the ones that they are weak in.Though Input and Output Hypotheses are on Second language acquisition, forEnglish learning as a foreign language in China, they can still be used as references forthe educators. After the publishing of the New National Curriculum, students’ level ofEnglish on listening, speaking, reading and writing in each grade has been specificallydescribed. In order to reach the requirement of the New National English Curriculum aswell as to establish students-centered classroom, it is necessary to improve students’oral English.However, in present oral English teaching in China, there are many problems inteaching materials, teachers and students. The author then analyzes the problems andbrings forward strategies on how to improve students’ oral English based from bothInput and Output Hypotheses based on Multi-intelligences Theories to reach therequirements of New National English Curriculum. To test the strategies, the authordesigns an experiment in the two classes as follows.The experiment that the author did is on two randomly distributed classes inGrade Seven. The entrance exam showed they are of the same level of English.Multi-intelligence Theory, Input Hypothesis, and Output Hypothesis have been appliedin English class. After using questionnaires, pre-test, classroom design and post-tests tocollect data, the author analyzed the data with the assistance of SPSS. Then according tothe experiments, some strategies on how to improve students oral English are given.The thesis consists of six parts, which includes the introduction, theoretical basis,current situation of oral English in China, strategies on how to improve junior middleschool students’ oral English, the experiment, and conclusion and limitations. Theexperiment shows that it is possible to improve students’ oral English if Multi-intelligences Theory is applied to strengthen input with output being properlytreated.