A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Text-based SCMC And Voice-based SCMC On Students' Oral Performance

As a global language,English plays an increasingly important role in today's frequent and intensive international exchanges.The problems that traditional college oral English teaching faces draw attention from more and more scholars and researchers.The arrival of the information age provides new vitality for improving oral English teaching and learning.It becomes a well worthy study to know how to use the network to promote college oral English teaching.The present thesis tries to compare the effects of Text-based SCMC and Voice-based SCMC on non-English majors' oral performance through experiment,in order to explore a suitable practical way to improve students' oral English proficiency.To begin with,the present study discusses the effect of SCMC on the development of language proficiency from a theoretical perspective.From the perspective of interaction hypothesis,Synchronous computer-mediated communication,when employed for the purpose of foreign language teaching and learning,generally involves language input,output and interaction/negotiation.Input may come from the partner's output or the language materials provided by the teacher,whereas output is essential to the expression of ideas by the two parties;consequently language learning is promoted.As a new type of cognitive activity,synchronous computermediated communication,functioning as a link between speaking and writing,can thus facilitate the development of language proficiency.Both the quantitative and the qualitative research methods are employed in this study and three research questions related to Text-based SCMC and Videobased SCMC are addressed: At the end of the study,will V-SCMC and T-SCMC these two modes of communication exert different results in students' oral progress? If so,What differences are there between T-SCMC and V-SCMC in terms of amount of output,lexical richness,syntactic complexity and communicative strategies? What are the students' attitudes toward these two modes of communication? The research subjects are 48 freshmen majoring in International business at one University in Chongqing.The participants were divided into the text-based SCMC group and voice-based SCMC group.The whole experiment lasts for four weeks of oral English teaching.After analyzing the results of tests,oral English performance,questionnaires and interviews,the study reveals that: both the text-based SCMC and voice-based SCMC have some effects on non-English majors' oral performance;there is a significant difference in the effects of text-based SCMC and voicebased SCMC on English general speaking proficiency,in amount of output,the text-based SCMC exerts more positive effects,however,in pronunciation and fluency aspects,the voice-based SCMC group plays more effects on speaking proficiency,especially in liaison;but text-based group seems more likely tolerate with pauses.In other aspects,there is no significant difference.