Action Research On Junior Middle School Oral English Teaching With The Help Of Pictures And Mind Map From The Perspective Of Frame Theory

In these past decades of English teaching, the four basic skills of junior high school students, i.e. listening, reading, speaking and writing have been greatly developed. However, among the four basic skills of English, speaking is still facing the reality of unbalanced development. Many efforts from teachers and scholars have been made and much progress in speaking skills thus has also been made under the guidance of various teaching theories. Most of the students‘ verbal skills are weak. The reality proves that oral English expression is still the most difficult and communicatively impeding element for most students to overcome, and it is the toughest skill to master, though they have learned English for many years. The author of this thesis attempts to explore this problem through frame theory.Frame theory comes from two sources. One is from sociological theory, the other is from psychological theory, i.e. schema, cognitive process hypothesis construction. According to the frame theory, it emphasizes how to activate the frame knowledge and experience stored in the learners‘ mind, how to reunite the knowledge and experience in frames to direct learners to choose right sentence structures in a logical way from a certain perspective to activate and retrieve information for oral output. In the process of output, as long as full frame elements and corresponding words are available to the students, the smooth expressing will be expected, and their oral competence has been gradually improved. The author believes that the teaching method based on frame theory is a new, effective way to solve the oral problems of the students for English teaching in junior high schools. Two classes of Grade One(total 58) students of Lvtian Middle School were chosen by the author as the teaching subjects for the action research. In this action research based on frame theory, the author uses the pictures as a teaching aid, and mind mapping as a teaching approach for their construction of a topic frame. In this research which is based on the frame theory, the following two questions are explored.1) Based on frame theory, can the oral English teaching improve students‘ oral English competence in junior middle schools?2) Guided by frame theory, are pictures and mind map the valid means to improve students‘ oral competence in junior middle schools?After four months of teaching, from the major findings in this action research, the students' oral competence was found to be significantly improved, definitely better than the time when the frame theory had not been previously employed to guide teaching activities. Under the guidance of frame theory, pictures, as well as mind mapping used as teaching aids to build topic frame played a very good effect, which are suitable for junior high school students. With the proved feasibility and effectiveness of oral teaching in junior high school, the frame theory of cognitive linguistics pointed out the direction for the future development of the oral English teaching model for junior high schools.