| Due to the lack of authentic language environment in class, oral English teaching in China has been relatively weak. Most students find it hard to improve their speaking competency, as they seldom get the chances to practice their oral English with simulated situation of real communication. This research adopts the movie clips to facilitate oral practice in English class with the attempt to bring the real-life situations as well as current topics from reality to the class,so as to enhance the effectiveness of oral English practice.Enlightened by previous research on oral English teaching and theoretically guided by Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Multiple Intelligence Theory and Swain's Output Hypothesis, an action research was conducted which lasted for nearly seven months from September 2014 to April 2015. The participants are 39 students in Class One Grade Nine of the Foreign Language Academy of No.1 Middle School. The research mainly investigated whether the activities based on the English movie clips can improve students' oral English performance and reflected how an English teacher should design and organize the activities properly to ensure the effectiveness of action research. This research followed the four steps of action research design proposed by Kemmis, which consists of plan, action, observation and reflection. Totally 42 clips which are related to the 14 topics in the textbook were selected out of 210 movie clips by the combined efforts of the students and the teacher as the teaching material. Based on the 42 clips, 84 class activities were conducted to fall into 4 types: shadowing exercises, role play, film dubbing, and retelling. The first round of action lasted from September of 2014 to October of 2014, and it focused on the preparations of the movie clips and get students involved with some simple shadowing exercises when playing the English movie clips. The length of the movie clips is from 5 to 10 minutes. The second round of action started from November of 2014 and ends in December of 2014. The students continued to join in the dubbing activities with scripts on the screen based on simple English movie clips. Whereas the third stage started from February of 2015 to April of 2015 which emphasized on the better uses of the movie clips to improve students' oral English performance. The movie clips adopted in this round are from the second term of Grade Eight and are all 3 to 5 minutes long. The role play with more complicated topics was added in this round and the dubbing activities are with no scripts on the screen.The questionnaires and the oral English tests were used as the instruments to collect the data for the research and support the teacher-researcher's reflection. The results were analyzed by Microsoft Excel 2007. The research results support the findings: learners' scores of the oral post-test are obviously higher than that of the pre-test. There are indicators that the students improved their accuracy and fluency of the oral English performance through three rounds of action. Besides, the classroom activities with English movie clips can promote students' abilities to imitate, express and edit language. What's more, students' confidence,interests and the activeness in oral English learning are highly raised.As the research process is accompanied by the teacher-researcher's observation and reflection, we would like to propose the following suggestions which might be of some implications to other oral English teachers. It is strongly suggested that classroom activities with movie clips catering to students' level and interest be adopted in class while trying to create the authentic English environment in class. And equal importance should be attached to the variety of such activities to keep up learners' interest in the oral class and draw their attention to accuracy, fluency, and the communicative ability in oral English performance. |
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