An Empirical Study On Spoken English Teaching In Junior High Schools Based On Context Theory

Language is the most important communicative tool of human beings. And its essential function is social communication. Generally, language can be divided into two forms: spoken language and written language. Spoken language, which involves listening skill and speaking skill, accounts for 75% in people’s daily speech act. Its significant role is quite obvious. However, for a long time, spoken English teaching has been neglected by teachers and students in Chinese high schools.In order to know how serious the actual condition is, the author distributed 732 questionnaires in seven schools within four municipal districts in Fuzhou. After analyzing the data, the author found that more than half of the students can’t live up to the high requirement of English Curriculum Standard. Lack of context in the spoken English class is an important cause that results in this disparity.Based on the findings, this research integrates context teaching with spoken English teaching and comes up with the concept “contextualized spoken English teaching”. This research chooses context theory as its linguistic foundation and constructionism as its psychology foundation. In the instructional design, the author firstly puts forward three principles to construct the frame of contextualized spoken English teaching: principle of purposiveness, principle of cooperation and principle of appropriateness. Then, the author advances four operating steps in the spoken English class: preset the context, present the clue, practice in the context and practical application outside the classroom. At last, the author expounds methods to create situational context in the spoken English class with some relative case analyses in Project English.Before the empirical study, the author made three assumptions about the effect of contextualized spoken English teaching:(1)It can arouse students’ learning motivation and interest towards spoken English;(2)It can retard students’ anxiety level in spokenEnglish class;(3)It can improve students’ communicative competence. In the two-month empirical study, the two classes were segmented into control class and experimental class. Through the comparative analysis of the data, the rationality of the three assumptions was finally verified.In the end, the author provides some meaningful pedagogical implications according to his own experience during teaching.The research achievement is a rewarding reference to teacher’s design of spoken English teaching activity in junior high school.