A Study On The Design Of English Classroom Oral Activities At Senior High Schools Based On The Unit Theme

The main purpose of learning English is using language to effectively communicate with each other.Oral communication is the most common one to interact with others.Therefore,it is important for the students to improve their speaking skills.According to the National English Curriculum Standards for Common Senior High School(2017),students should develop language skills through a large number of comprehensive language practice activities and lay a foundation for the real communication.The speaking can be improved only through speaking more.Therefore,a variety of oral activities should be designed to improve learners’ willingness to communicate in English.Although teachers have tried the thematic teaching and oral activities has been designed from different aspects in teaching practice.Few research can be found on oral activities based on the unit theme.Therefore,based on the Whole Language Teaching,Input Hypothesis,as well as Output Hypothesis,this thesis combines the thematic teaching with classroom oral activities,aiming to solve the following three questions:1.What are the commonly used unit oral activities in English senior high school class?2.How the unit theme based oral activities are organized in English senior high school class?3.What are the teaching effects of unit theme based oral activities in English senior high school class?Participants are 100 senior One high school students from two parallel classes in a high school in Shandong.There are 50 students in Class 9 as the experiment class and 50 students in Class 10 as the control class.The students were asked to finish the two oral tests to know their oral proficiency.Follow-up interview was conducted in the experiment and five randomly chosen students from the experiment class are asked to be interviewed before and after the experiment.At the end of the experiment,the collected data are analyzed by using SPSS 22.0.Results indicated both the functional communication activities and social interaction activities are collected in the commonly used classroom oral activities.Form and meaning are both emphasized in these activities.The presented teaching case is just a preliminary trying by combining the oral activities and unit theme.Other teaching designing can also be tried and explored at the further research.What’s more,other types of thematic activities can be included in oral teaching,for example,the unit lecture,unit debate and so on.These activities are designed to encourage learners to deeply understand the unit theme.In the end,the designing of the oral evaluation form is also essential during the teaching.The students who are from the experiment class have improved a lot on their oral proficiency than those students who are under the traditional teaching.The students enjoy this teaching and they have formed a comprehensive understanding of the unit theme.The presented designing principles and framework will be helpful for the following teaching design and research.