The Effect Of Communicative Language Teaching On Oral Fluency Of Non-English Majors

The oral competence of non-English major students is far from being satisfactory. While oral fluency, which is generally considered to be the key measurement of the oral competence, needs more attention. However, the traditional English teaching method focuses on the training of the accuracy, and ignores the improvement of speech fluency. Therefore, this research aims to improve non-English major students'oral fluency by the communicative language teaching method.This research targets at non-English major students in Yili Normal University of Xinjiang province. Two classes are chosen as the control class and the experiment class. The control class is taught by means of the traditional teaching method, and the experiment class is taught by means of the communicative teaching method. The author used the one-minute personal statement in the pretest and posttest to evaluate subjects' speech in these two classes. The results of the tests are recorded by the device and then transcribed into word files. Besides the tests, questionnaires and interviews are also used in the study for data collection. Then the Cool Edit Pro 2.0 and the SPSS 16.0 are used to analyze the data. The findings include:(1) The communicative teaching method has a positive effect on non-English major students'oral fluency. It can improve the oral fluency level of students. The oral fluency are measured through these following temporal indices, such as speech rate, articulation rate, phonation ratio, mean length of run, and average length of pause. After trained by means of the communicative language teaching method, subjects in the experiment class have faster speech rate and articulation rate. They could produce a higher proportion of phonation ratio, longer speech runs, and shorter pauses than the initial level. What's more, the results of paired samples t-test also show significant differences in those five indices. Those indicate subjects in the experiment class have made progresses in speech fluency.(2) Apart from fluency, communicative teaching method might be effective in stimulating students'learning motivation, making students more participative, improving the learning atmosphere, and smoothing the teacher-student relationship.(3) According to this research, communicative language teaching method could not effectively improve students' accuracy and syntactic complexity. The linguistic indices, such as the ratio of error-free T-unit and subordinate clauses per T-unit, are used to find out the limitations of communicative language teaching method. Although subjects in the experiment class have made slight advances in these two aspects, the paired samples t-test presents insignificance. Those suggest communicative language teaching method may not be a useful way to improve grammatical competence of students. Besides, it puts the higher requirement to teachers' teaching competence and students' oral expression.