An Empirical Study On Story Retelling Strategy's Influence On Oral Fluency Of Junior Middle School Students Based On Output Hypothesis

Oral English,as one of the most important aspects in English learning and teaching,is paid more and more attention among English learners and teachers.How to learn oral English and how to improve students' oral fluency has been a public concern for many years.The author tries to find efficient ways to solve these problems by doing researches and experiments.This paper is an empirical study of story retelling's influence on oral fluency of junior middle school students based on output hypothesis.There are two research questions,one is which aspects of oral fluency are influenced based on story retelling strategy,and the other is which aspects are influenced the most significantly.In order to answer these two questions,the author applies qualitative evaluation in this paper.All the participants,studying at Lu Shan International Experimental School,are from Class1417 and Class1418 in Grade nine.One of the classes is regarded as control group(CG)with 60 students,and the other is set as experimental group(EG),in which there are 58 students.Before the experiment,CG and EG are tested: the writer finds there is no any significant difference about the oral fluency within these two groups based on oral fluency evaluation model.Through questionnaires,the writer figures out whether they are familiar with story retelling strategy and whether they have applied it in oral English learning.In the experiment,the students in EG apply story retelling strategy to practice and improve their oral English,while those students in CG practice their spoken English by retelling the text or the story.And the teacher asks those students to complete their oral practice based on his requirements and use voice recording tools like sound recorder,smart-phone and MP3 to record their voice when doing their oral practice,and after that they are required to send the voice samples to the writer.When it comes to voice analyzing and transcribing,the paper applies Cool Edit Pro to play and hear the voice samples,mark the pauses in the voice samples,transcribe the voice samples into written English and analyze each transcribed written data based on those eight indices of oral fluency evaluation.After classifying and collating the data,the writer uses SPSS(version 15.0)to analyze and compare them,and then the result of the experiment comes out.After analyzing and comparing the data of the two groups in the post test,the paper finds that the students both in experimental group and control group have improved their oral fluency in many aspects in different ways.On average,all the students in these two groups have made progress than before in terms of oral fluency indices.The speaking rate of the participants and articulation rate in EG is higher than that of CG,and P value of them are 0.025 and 0.026.And the mean length run of EG is longer than that of CG on average,and P value is 0.008.The most significant difference is the ratio of error-free T-units to total T-units,The P value is 0.000.The result of the experiment shows that story retelling strategy plays an active role in developing students' L2 oral fluency.Students who apply this learning strategy have improved the L2 oral fluency greatly.Participants in experimental group make progress in aspects of speaking rate and articulation rate along with the mean length of run.What's more,they produce more error free T-units than those in control group,which is very significant.From the research,the results of the paper show that story retelling strategy can be treated as an efficient way to develop L2 oral fluency,and this study provides a research direction and an example for those who take part in oral English teaching and learning or language testing in the future.English learners and those who are interested in English can also apply this strategy to enhance L2 oral fluency.