A Survey On The English Speaking Performance Of Chinese Postgraduates In An Intercultural Teaching Context

With the further development of globalization and internationalization,as well as the growing need for academic communication,it becomes more important for postgraduates to master English,especially spoken English.However,in the practice of college foreign language education for a long time,the effect of oral English teaching is unsatisfactory,especially at the postgraduate level.Therefore,understanding the current characteristics of Chinese postgraduates' oral English performance and probing the factors influencing it are effective ways to improve Chinese postgraduates' spoken English performance.However,most of the existing studies use qualitative questionnaires to research the current characteristics of students' spoken English.And the research involving postgraduates is relatively rare.Additionally,the studies on the influencing factors of students' oral English performance only focus on one aspect.Based on the measures of students' oral English utilized in previous research,the writer recorded,transcribed,and analyzed the oral English performance of 50 postgraduates in an international academic writing course so as to understand the current characteristics of their spoken English in detail.The measures include three aspects,i.e.complexity,accuracy,and fluency,involving eleven indicators,which are the average number of clauses contained in each AS-unit1,the average number of words contained in each AS-unit,Guiraud's Index,the number of idea units,the ratio of extended idea units to all idea units,the average number of error-free clauses included in each AS-unit,the average number of agreement errors contained in each AS-unit,the average number of article errors included in each AS-unit,the average number of other errors included in each AS-unit,the unpicked speech rate,and the pruned speech rate.Then,one-on-one interviews with 15 students and the foreign teacher of this course were issued to explore the influencing factors of postgraduates' spoken English and relevant advice.The research questions of this study are: 1)What are the current characteristics of Chinese postgraduates' oral English performance in terms of complexity,accuracy,and fluency? 2)Is there any difference between their oral English performance produced with non-native English speakers and that produced with native English speakers? 3)What are the major factors that affect postgraduates' oral English performance?The research results show that China's postgraduates can express their opinions with basic accuracy and fluency,and there is no statistically significant difference between the oral English performance of female and male postgraduate students,between the spoken English of masters and doctoral students,as well as between the oral English output produced by students from liberal arts majors and that produced by those from science and engineering majors.The trade-off effect is observed between complexity and accuracy of participants' spoken English.In terms of complexity and accuracy,the spoken English performance of postgraduates talking with native English speakers is significantly different from that of postgraduates talking with non-native English speakers.The factors that affect the performance of graduate students' spoken English mainly include lack of self-confidence,fear of making mistakes,lack of communication strategies and confusion with the difference between expressions in Chinese and English.