Researches Concerning The Effects Of The Immersion Teaching Approach On Junior High School Students' Oral English Teaching

Along with the proposal of The Core Competencies and Values for Chinese Students' Development(2014)and the further deepening of The New English Curriculum Standards(2011),higher and newer requirements have been put forward for junior high school students' English learning.Oral English is an important basic skill in the process of English learning,and it also reflects the comprehensive ability for students to use language.At the same time,the society's demands for the capability to the application and expression of language is constantly increasing.However,the current situation of oral English teaching in China is not that optimistic.That is,teacher-centered teaching method occupies the mainstream position of oral English teaching and the phenomenon of dumb English is still widespread and some students even feel ashamed to open their months.In recent years,many experts and scholars in foreign language teaching and teachers struggling in the front line have also realized that foreign language teaching is no longer limited to the learning of language knowledge itself or the tools for dealing with examinations.Nevertheless,the improvement of oral English proficiency,intercultural communication competence and the cultivation of students'study motivation must also be placed in the vital position.Therefore,on the basis of in-depth research of spoken language teaching theory,this thesis takes the theory of critical period hypothesis,language input and output theory and the interaction hypothesis as the main theoretical basis.In this study,immersion teaching is defined as a new teaching method which refers to the teaching mode in which the second language is used as the medium of instruction.Students are immersed in the second language environment for the whole or half of the time on campus.The purpose of this research is to study the effects of immersion approach on students' speaking ability,intercultural communication competence and study motivation and to try to fill in the shortcomings of previous studies.In this thesis,the quasi-experimental design of pretest and post-test comparison group were used.The empirical study lasted for one semester,a total of 16 teaching weeks.From March 2018 to June 2018,the two natural classes were randomly selected from the school where the author taught during her educational practice.The 100 participants included 56 boys and 44 girls.The average age was 13.33 years.Oral English is taught in the experimental class in the immersion approach,while the control class is still in the traditional teaching mode.After the intervention of immersion teaching method,8 students in the experimental class were interviewed by the author through the semi-structured interview.In order to explore the research questions,the triangulation measurement method was adopted,so both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used to inquire into the teaching e:ffects of immersion by means of experiment,scales measurement,questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview.After the data collection was finished,the author used SPSS 20.0 software to test the significant difference by using independent sample T-test and paired sample T-test.The results of interviews were integrated and recorded by transcription in order to find out the reasons that support the quantitative research results and to find out the students'viewpoints on immersion teaching and suggestions for the future implementation.Through a one-semester teaching experiment,the author summarizes the findings as follows:1.The immersion teaching approach is conductive to the improvement of students' speaking ability from the aspects of vocabulary and grammar,pronunciation and intonation,discourse length and coherence and communicative competence.2.The immersion teaching approach is conductive to the improvement of students' intercultural communication competence.3.The immersion teaching approach is conductive to the improvement of the vast majority of students' study motivation.At the same time,students who involved in this experiment also put forward a lot of valuable suggestions,which were of great benefit to our subsequent research and teaching practice.