A Comparative Study Of The Effects Between Open Class And Conventional Class On Senior High School Students’ Oral English Proficiency

According to the newly issued New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools in Jiangsu province,as one of the four basic skills of English,the purpose of speaking is to promote students’ ability to use English to express their thoughts and to communicate with English speakers in real life situation.However,the reality is that senior high school students’oral English proficiency is still far from satisfactory.Though a lot of researches on oral English have been conducted by scholars both home and abroad,few studies have been conducted to compare the different effects between open class and conventional class on senior high students’oral English proficiency.Therefore,three research questions are advanced on the basis of Input Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Interaction Theory.Q1:What are the different effects between open class and conventional class on senior high school students’ oral English proficiency in terms of the amount of output?Q2:What are the different effects between open class and conventional class on senior high school students’ oral English proficiency in terms of accuracy?Q3:What are the different effects between open class and conventional class on senior high school students’ oral English proficiency in terms of syntactic complexity?Quantitative research was employed in this study,lasting for two weeks.The researcher herself and her two colleagues attended the research.The instruments involved final English examination of senior two students,an oral English pre-test and oral English recordings both in open class and conventional class.According to result of the final examination of senior two,EC and CC were decided,and then an oral English pre-test-was organized to choose 15 students in each class respectively as the participants who were at the same English level.The teaching procedure in EC was conducted in the form of open class while in CC the form of conventional class was adopted.The two classes were both taught by the researcher herself,using the same teaching plan,teaching material,teaching methods,and teaching procedures.With regard to data collection and data analysis,these two classes were firstly audio-recorded;the collected data were then transcribed into words by the researcher and checked by her two colleagues;finally the data were analyzed with the help of software SPSS 16.0.Major findings are:(1)compared to conventional class,open class was beneficial to improving students’ oral English proficiency in terms of the amount of oral output.(2)there was a significant difference in students’ oral English proficiency in terms of accuracy.(3)the difference in students’ oral English proficiency in terms of syntactic complexity between open class and conventional class is not significant.The pedagogical implications of this study are as follows:(1)Friendly atmosphere should be created and meaningful activities should be designed so as to arouse students’ interest and enthusiasm,which is of great benefit to improving students’ oral English proficiency.(2)scaffolding should be built to develop learners’ knowledge and skills in the process of communication.(3)more time should be spared for students to collect information about the topic to improve their oral English accuracy and syntactic complexity.There are also some limitations in this research and suggestions for future studies:(1)the experimental time was limited and the number of participants was small,so the time span of the research can be prolonged and more open classes and conventional classes can be organized and investigated so as to ensure that the results of the research are reliable and convincing.(2)many other aspects such as the teacher’s feedback,the question types or other questioning strategies that may affect students’ oral English proficiency were not dealt with.These aspects should be taken into account in the future studies.