An Empirical Study Of Effects Of Translanguaging On Junior High School Underachievers’ Oral English Communicative Competence

One of the goals of English instruction is to develop students’ ability to communicate in English,which has been agreed upon in academic and pedagogical domains both at home and abroad.In the few decades,Chinese students’ oral English competence has improved as a result of the new curriculum reform,but English underachievers remain a thorny issue,with low classroom participation and feeling anxiety about oral expression.Translanguaging is an emerging language teaching strategy based on post-structuralism and social culture theory,which teachers use a variety of language resources and other modalities to provide reasonable scaffolding for underachievers to reduce their anxiety,increase their learning interest and motivation,improve their classroom participation and willingness to communicate,and ultimately facilitate their oral English competence.Translanguaging,with its creative and critical characteristics,opens up new avenues for improving the oral English competence of junior high school underachievers.So far,however,few empirical studies have been conducted on the topic of teaching oral English to junior high school underachievers by using translanguaging.Given this context,this thesis uses junior high school underachievers as the research object,to explore the possible effect of translanguaging in improving their oral English competence.Based on the research background described above,this study intends to investigate the following three research questions:(1)What is the current situation of junior high school underachievers’ oral English competence?(2)Can translanguaging improve junior high school underachievers’ oral English competence by raising their willingness to communicate?(3)What effect of translanguaging on junior high school underachievers’ oral English competence?Based on a review of pertinent literature,this study drew on the “Bilingual Teaching Model from the Translanguaging Perspective” proposed by Xu(2020),and chose 40 underachievers in a junior high school in Chongqing whose speaking scores are under 9 as the research object,used the questionnaire,oral test and semi-structured interview as research tools.By comparing and analyzing the oral English scores and the results of the relevant questionnaire and interview,the following major findings were achieved:(1)Junior high school underachievers’ oral English competence is at a medium level and needs to be improved.They typically experience anxiety and limited classroom participation in the immersive learning environment.(2)Junior high school underachievers’ attitude towards translanguaging is positive,as translanguaging can lower their anxiety about speaking English and enhance their classroom participation.(3)Translanguaging can improve junior high school underachievers’ underachievers’ oral English competence,particularly in fluency and accuracy.According to the results,this study validates the effectiveness of translanguaging for junior high school underachievers’ development of oral English competence.It offers some enlightenment for future researchers and teachers interested in the study and teaching of oral English competence.However,the short period and small sample size had an impact on the generalization of this study and the experimental effect of translanguaging.As a result,future studies can increase the total sample size and extend the experimental period to achieve better experimental results and improve their representativeness.