Appraisal Theory And The Cultivation Of Middle School Students’ Oral Communicative Ability

As we all know, the main function of language is communication. In recent years, language communicative ability, especially, oral communicative ability has gradually get more and more attention. But, according to the survey, it is a fact that middle school students’ oral communicative ability is very weak. Students can not use the semantic resources they have learned to exactly express their affect, judgment and evaluation in oral communication. As the result, the communication will be likely to be misunderstood, and the relationship will be influenced.Concerning this problems, in recent years, scholars at home and abroad through a large number of experiments concluded that based on appraisal theory, oral English teaching could improve students’ oral communicative ability. But most of studies just concerned with college students’ oral English teaching, seldom involved middle school oral English teaching. Therefore, this thesis tries to study whether applying appraisal theory into middle school oral English teaching can improve students’ oral communicative ability to some degree and how to cultivate middle school students’ oral communicative ability under the guidance of appraisal theory.In the first place, this study thinks that appraisal theory has a significant guidance to junior middle school oral English teaching and proves that it is feasible to apply appraisal theory into junior middle school oral English teaching. Because of the communicative quality of oral English, there are rich language resources of expressing affect, judgment appreciation and many graduation resources to express gradability of attitudes. Appraisal theory(AT), as a new development of international function, is mainly concern about how to use language to achieve the ultimate goal of communication from the perspective of lexicon-grammar. Appraisal and evaluation are similar but not exactly the same. Compared with evaluation, appraisal is more concrete concept for discourse analysis. The relationship between evaluation and appraisal is similar to the relationship between language and speech. The theory consists of three sub-systems, namely, the attitude system, the engagement system and graduation system. But because of the actual situation of middle school students, the thesis mainly applies the attitude and graduation system to junior middle school oral English teaching. The attitude system will help junior middle school students learn how to use attitude resources to express their affect, judgment, and appreciation about people and things. The graduation system will teach them know the strength/weak of semantic will influence the goal of communication and then help them learn how to use graduation resources to express appropriately their attitudes and achieve different degrees of communication tasks.In the second place, taking two parallel classes from Yangshan middle school as experimental subjects, a specific teaching experiment is made to find whether applying appraisal theory into junior middle school oral English teaching can improve students’ oral communicative ability. One is an experimental class, the other is a controlled class. By the methods of questionnaire, data analysis and case study, the author does an experimental analysis about the two classes of students’ oral ability before and after the experiment, especially makes a detailed comparison and analysis of the collected two oral test data, and finds that the students in experimental class know how to use different appraisal resources to achieve the goal of communication. The results of experiment show that the application of appraisal theory into junior middle school oral English teaching can improve students’ oral communicative ability to some degree. But due to the difficulty of this topic, the limited of short time, small sample and the study ability of the author, certain limitations inevitably exit in the research and need us make a further thought to realize improvement.