A Study On Junior Middle School Students' Self-esteem And Its Relationship With Oral Production

Self-esteem,as an essential psychological factor,has been widely researched since James(1890)put forward its conception-the feeling one holds to himself.In recent years,studies have proved the influence of self-esteem on achievement,especially students' academic achievement in the school.However,even though lots of work has been done to explore the relation among self-esteem,achievement,second language learning and linguistics,most of them focus on college students,few researchers have set their foot on the correlation between junior middle school students' self-esteem and their oral production in terms of the three aspects of fluency,accuracy and complexity.Therefore,it is of great necessity to proceed the study.Based on the affective filter hypothesis and output hypothesis,this study chose61 junior middle school students as the subjects to collect their information of self-esteem and oral production.The instruments used in this study were Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale(1965)and an oral test for senior high school entrance examination.SPSS software and Antconc were applied to analyze the following research issues: the general situation of the self-esteem and oral production in narrative task of junior middle school students;the relationship between self-esteem and three aspects of oral production: fluency,accuracy and complexity;the difference between high and low self-esteem of junior middle school students in the oral production;the effect of gender upon students' self-esteem and oral production.The research results are listed as follows:The general situation of self-esteem of junior middle school students is that most of them possess low self-esteem,which means they are not confident in the learning process.In terms of their oral production,students with different levels of English proficiency perform differently.The worst students can not say even one word,and the top students can make a perfect oral production with great fluency,accuracy,but not so good in complexity.There exists strong and positive correlation between self-esteem and the fluency,accuracy and lexical complexity of oral production in the narrative task,but no obvious correlation with syntax complexity.That is to say,high self-esteem students have better performance in making fluent and accurate speech with more diversified words,but the same situation can not be found in sentence complexity.There is obvious difference between high and low self-esteem students in the aspects of fluency,accuracy and lexical complexity,still no difference in syntaxcomplexity.In other words,self-esteem has no direct relation with sentence complexity.High self-esteem students may not produce complex sentences and low self-esteem students may make more complex sentences structure than high self-esteem students in circumstances.The gender is not the decisive factor influencing the self-esteem and oral production of junior middle school students.The results show that the level of self-esteem doesn't depend on whether someone is a girl or a boy.And the performance in oral production is also independent of gender.Based on the results and discoveries above,suggestions and implications are put forward.The first one is some education implication for the teachers,such as the measures they can take to improve students' self-esteem and decrease their anxiety while outputting.The second one is the thinking for the future research.More attention should be paid to the younger learners and much more efforts need to be made to explore comprehensive methods of helping learner's real oral ability.