Study On The Application Of Pictures In Oral English Teaching In Junior Middle School

The New English Curriculum Standards(2013)requires that junior school students should comprehend a certain English vocabularies and patterns to communicate in English speaking,and learn to express their different opinions and attitude in English.In 2000,Jiang Su Province took the lead in the provinces in holding the oral English test.Therefore,above this,English speaking is a very important part in junior school English learning.With the help of teachers,based on the certain English vocabularies and English sentences,students may have the chance to exercise speaking in the simple dialogue training.However,the speaking ability of students in junior school still needs improving further,which cannot meet the requirements of the New English Curriculum Standards.Therefore how to improve students' English speaking ability is a major problem for researchers to think over.In recent researches,the author finds that pictures are very frequently used in English teaching.As visual aids,pictures are very vivid and intuitive.American scholar Harary who focuses on the graphics research said that “A picture is worth a thousand words”.Compared with the language and the words,pictures possess more intuitive performance capabilities.Pictures can give students some hints to “force” them to express or speak.These vivid and interesting pictures enable students to say or to speak in that picture provides students with the learning motivation which enhances their interests virtually in the oral English learning.So in English speaking training,the author thinks that pictures have certain advantages.Based on the reference of some relative literatures on picture-aid teaching both at home and abroad,the training of students' oral English becomes the research point.So in the thesis,the author tries to answer the following two questions:1.How do teachers use the proper pictures to improve students' oral English in Junior Middle School?2.What effects do the pictures have on students' oral English learning?After the literature review and theoretical discussion,oral English tests and questionnaires are designed and put into practice.A total of 37 junior three students in Si Hong Junior Middle School in Jiang Su province are selected as the subjects.The whole procedure lasts about 12 weeks.In each period,the students are required to receive oral English test.After the test,the according scores of every student are recorded to analyze.The last results show that firstly,different types of pictures should be applied in different tasks,for example,in the part of “Welcome to the Unit” in the textbook of Ninth Grade English,the author thinks that comic strip can more easily attract students' interest through the task of role-playing;in the part of “integrated skill”,the table can more clearly list the different opinions to help students organize or elaborate their point of view;and in the task part,a series of pictures can help students not only expand their imagination but also train their speaking ability.Secondly,the application of pictures has an obvious effect on the junior three students' oral English learning which mainly shows in the following aspects: pictures with its unique characteristics can stimulate the interest of students to speaking;picture-aid teaching help students more fluently speaking English in the training process;and the application of pictures directly provide students with more opportunities to speaking English.So in this extent it is feasible to train students' speaking ability through the using of pictures.Based on the results,some suggestions for teachers in picture-using process to train students' English speaking are given: teachers should employ the pictures moderately and avoid distracting students' attention,and teachers should make enough preparation in picture-using.Although there are still some limitations in this paper,picture-aid is a very multifunctional teaching method in training students' speaking ability and is worthy to be carried out in English teaching.It is hoped that this study can give some help for teachers in oral English teaching so that they can further improve the teaching method.