An Experimental Research On The Effects Of American Sitcoms On Students' Oral English

With the rapid development of international globalization,the importance of English has become increasingly prominent in people's lives.Cultivating students' comprehensive English application ability,especially oral English ability,is an inevitable requirement of social needs and the development of higher education.In order to meet the new requirements of the development of China's higher education,and to keep up with the new situation of talent training in today's society,effectively improving students' actual ability of oral communication has become the most important problem of foreign language teaching.This research verifies that American sitcoms have a positive impact on the improvement of students' oral English ability through teaching practice.The experimental material is the classic American sitcom The Big Bang Theory(the first and the second season)which is rich in plots and comprehensive in the topics of oral English.This experimental research lasted for 16 weeks and totaled 32 hours.The subjects were 60 graduate students of non-English majors of 2017 from Beijing Jiaotong University and they were divided into the experimental group and the control group equally to guarantee the accuracy of the result.The experimental process mainly included pretest,teaching activities and post-test.The pretest was used to record the initial level of students' oral English.The teaching activities mainly contained watching the sitcoms in class,oral practice,reviewing after class and observations in class.All the students' audio recordings of the pretest,the post-test and oral practice in the whole process of the research were used to be studied.At the end of the experiment,the post-test was performed with the same difficulty and the same length of time as the pretest to record students' oral English level.Besides,a Test Scale of Oral English Ability has been designed to collect and compare the changing factors of the students' oral English ability before and after watching over 20 hours videos of American sitcom from various perspectives,like the fluency,accuracy and vocabulary diversity in students' oral English expressions.Through the ways of the oral English tests,the observation in class,the training data collection and the questionnaires in the experimental group and the control group,combining the quantitative and qualitative methods,the data of the students' recordings were compared and analyzed.The results of data analysis showed that the oral English teaching which was based on watching American sitcoms had a significant effect on improving students' oral English ability.Most of the students tended to have an active attitude to this kind of teaching style,and they held the viewpoint that this teaching method can provide them with a perfect platform to practice their oral English by making oral English learning an interesting and easy thing.It contributed to stimulating students' interest in learning English and cultivating students'self-confidence in oral English.This experimental research indicates that it is feasible and suitable to apply the American sitcoms into the oral English teaching for the students and it also establishes a theoretical and practical foundations for future research in this field.