Functions Of Foreign Teachers On Cultivating Students’ English Listening And Speaking Ability In Primary Schools

With the development of globalization, Foreign language teaching circle follows the international trends step by step and regards foreign teachers as one of the effective forces to improve students’ English listening and speaking ability. Many universities, middle schools and primary schools in China have employed foreign teachers to teach English. There were many studies at home and abroad before focused on the analysis between foreign teachers’ language and local English teachers’, foreign teachers’ teaching methods and functions on developing students’ cross-culture awareness in secondary schools and universities, etc. And other studies focused on foreign teachers’ functions on cultivating junior or senior middle school students’ listening or speaking ability. But they didn’t have a systemic survey, basically taking the methods like questionnaires, interviews or classroom observations, seldom taking the standard tests to measure participants’ listening and speaking ability. Besides, little attention had been paid on foreign teachers’ functions on cultivating students’ listening and speaking ability in primary schools. In schools’ views, foreign teachers have played different functions in primary schools. For positive functions, students’ learning interests are aroused, good learning atmosphere is created and students’ listening and speaking ability are improved. For negative ones, foreign teachers are just symbols. It is hard for them to keep the class in order and their teaching contents are casual, students’ listening and speaking ability haven’t been improved. Many school principals often complain the high cost of them and low return. Despite the fact, there is little research on this aspect. Therefore, this ongoing research is intended to find out positive and negative functions of foreign teachers on cultivating student’s English listening and speaking ability in primary schools, underachieving positive functions and causes of inefficient use of them and corresponding improvements by the mixed methods like questionnaires, classroom observations, interviews and standard tests. Thus, it can show some implications for primary schools to optimize their management of foreign teachers, foreign teachers’ teaching ability and students’ English listening and speaking ability in primary schools.Based on the hypothesis of in comprehensible input i+1, if foreign teachers’ input is comprehensible and a little above students’ current English language level, then students’ English listening and speaking ability are improved. The author chooses two primary schools on the conditions of having the same or similar teaching level, the same number of English classes each week and mature local English teachers in Jinjiang District, Chengdu. They are Chengdu Jinjiang Foreign Language Primary School and De Sheng Branch of Yan Daojie Primary School. The former is school A(one foreign language school with foreign teachers), and the latter is school B(one similar school without foreign teachers). The participants are the students from the two classes in the same grade with the similar level, with 46 students every class from two primary schools respectively, foreign teachers, local English teachers and school leaders in school A. A mixed method: quantitative and qualitative is used to conduct the research. The author uses the questionnaires, classroom observations, interviews and standard tests(Grade one, Cambridge Young Learners’ English Tests and SEAS PROFICENCY TEST) to collect data. Then the universal applied statistical software: SPSS is applied to analyze the data. The research process are the followings: survey the characteristics of foreign teachers working in primary schools in Jinjiang district, realize students’ evaluation or needs of foreign teachers, know school leaders and local English teachers’ evaluation of them, observe their teaching, carry on standard tests on students’ listening and speaking and analysis of data, then conclude the positive and negative functions of foreign teachers on cultivating student’s English listening and speaking ability in primary schools, underachieving positive functions and causes of inefficient usage of them and corresponding improvements.Foreign teachers’ own advantages and disadvantages are found by questionnaires. In references with results of standard tests and classroom observations, foreign teachers play positive functions on cultivating students’ listening ability. They collect many teaching resources, design some listening practice, arouse students’ learning interests and students’ listening ability has been improved. On the contrary, it also finds out foreign teachers don’t play positive functions on cultivating students’ speaking ability in primary schools. Many causes produce this result such as poor teaching ability, absence of oral practice, casual teaching contents, disorder of class, student’s limited expressions and vocabularies, etc. Thus, students’ oral English hasn’t been developed. After analysis, it concludes that many factors cause the unbalanced function, such as unqualified teaching quality, lack of teaching experience and teaching theories, and simple teaching methods as well as the irrational management of foreign teachers. It also reaches many ways to solve these problems, like import qualified foreign teachers, provide training, inspect their teaching, carry out teaching research activities between local English teachers and foreign teachers and so on to optimize the management and improve their teaching quality.This paper contains five chapters. In Chapter One, it introduces the research background, purpose, contents and significance. It Chapter Two, it introduces the comprehensible input hypothesis proposed by Krashen and Terrel, and reviews the empirical researches on young learner’s language learning and foreign language teaching’s functions on improving English language teaching in China and abroad. In Chapter Three, it introduces the research questions, participants, methods of collecting data and analysis of data. In Chapter Four, it presents the findings and discussions, positive and negative functions on cultivating students’ listening and speaking ability in primary schools, underachieving positive functions, causes of unbalanced function, causes of the inefficient usage of foreign teachers and ways to make good use of them to cultivate students’ listening and speaking ability in primary schools. In Chapter Five, it concludes the findings and implications for school, local English teachers, foreign teachers and students. Besides, it talks about its limitation.