论文总字数：39548字

摘 要

情景教学法是一种教师创设具体情景使学生获取知识、激发学生学习兴趣的教学方法。目前，我国英语口语教学虽有所改善，但学生的口语能力仍有所欠缺。而这种现象，在乡镇中学学生身上体现的尤为明显。究其原因，是我国英语教育体制的缺陷、部分乡镇教师落后的教学观念、学生错误的学习观念等因素导致的。为改善这种状况，本论文基于情景教学法理论，提出四种口语教学的方法：歌曲、角色扮演、多媒体及游戏互动。希望此论文提出的教学方法和建议对提高乡镇中学学生的英语口语能力的提高有积极的帮助。

关键词：乡镇中学英语口语；情景教学法；教学方法

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Situational Teaching Method 2

2.2 Oral English teaching 3

3. The Current Situation of Oral English in Rural Middle School 5

3.1 The flaws of current English educational system 5

3.2 The problems of students 6

3.3 The problems of teachers 7

4. The Application of Situational Teaching Method in Oral English 9

4.1 The use of songs 9

4.2 The use of role-play 10

4.3 The use of multimedia 11

4.4 The use of game activities 12

5. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 15

1. Introduction

With the rapid development of economic globalization, our country needs more and more talents who have a command of foreign languages. Since English is one of the most important information carriers has been widely used in all fields of our life, it is very urgent to put forward English education to serve students with high quality and capacities. To reach the goal, every student in our country are ordered to learn English for at least nine years.

Of course, the compulsory education system brings a lot of benefits to our children: their abilities of writing and listening are improved. However, they don’t have the confidence to speak it and they are ashamed to express their ideas. Luckily, through many years’ struggling to “dumb English”, nowadays, the situation has been improved. As the “New English Curriculum Standard” is published, English teaching in our country starts a surprising reform. Students should be educated to master the four skills of English—— listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

In recent years, many excellent teachers have changed their opinions and taken effective actions. However, some teachers in rural areas haven’t accepted the new ideas. Because of this, students are controlled by tests. They don’t think that learning English is fun. And they can’t state their opinions bravely.

To solve the problems, this thesis attempts to analyze the application of Situational Teaching Method in oral English in rural middle schools. Palmer and Hornby made efforts to research this teaching method. And finally, they summed up a list of quite completed theories. In recent years, many professors of our country constantly make research on this teaching method. However, few people focus their attention on the gap of students’ oral English between rural areas and urban areas. Therefore, improving students’ oral English is turned out to be important.

Based on the related information and some suggestions, the thesis has five parts. The first chapter is the part of introduction. It talks about the purpose and significance of the thesis. The second chapter is literature review. Firstly, the thesis will discuss the definition and significance of Situational Teaching Method. Secondly, the importance of oral English for students in rural middle schools will be simply explained. The third part is about the current situation of oral English in rural middle schools. This chapter will analyze “dumb English” in rural areas from three aspects —— English educational system, students and teachers. The fourth chapter comes up with some concrete teaching methods which are applied in Situational Teaching Method. The last chapter is conclusion. This part will summarize the main ideas of the full paper.

2. Literature Review

Situational Teaching Method is considered to be an irrevocable teaching method in language teaching. It is widely applied to concentrate students’ attention in class and enrich their ways of thinking.

2.1 Situational Teaching Method

For Situational Teaching Method, different researchers have various definitions. The representatives of this teaching method, Brown and Colin write an article called Situated Cognition of Learning and think that “Knowledge can be produced only when it is applied in the situation because knowledge can’t be isolated from its environment, and the best method to learn knowledge is to carry it out in the context.” And Li Jilin talks about Situational Teaching Method in her book called Practice and Research of Situational Teaching Method and believes the teaching method is that “teachers should devise some situations which are related to the reality to arouse students’ interest and draw their attention.” (Li 86) Chinese mood theory and Situational Teaching Method are perfectly integrated in this concept. Also Liu Yong comes up with his idea in his article Try to Discuss the Application of Situational Teaching Method in English Classes that “Situational Teaching Method refers to a teaching method which teachers instruct students to acquire and practice their new learning by imitating real scenes.”

Before Situational Teaching Method was firstly proposed by British linguists, Brown and Colin, it appeared very early in different forms in ancient Greece and Rome. “Elicitation Teaching Theory” is one of the production of Situational Teaching Method. Socrates thought that he wasn’t the people who impart knowledge but the one who inspired people to find new things. Struggling to ponder upon some related questions designed by teachers, students are able to discover and summarize their ideas.

In the 1920s, Situational Teaching Method’s extensive use in enhancing students’ oral skills made it popular in Britain. This method stresses the creation of real or simulated contexts. “Context” was defined by B.Malinowski, an anthropologist of Poland, in 1923. In the article, The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Language, he tells that language can by no means be exactly assessed or comprehended without being set on in its “context of culture” or its “context of situation”. The appearance of “context” undoubtedly lays the foundation for Situational Teaching Method.

While in ancient China, the well-known educationist Zhuang Zhou comes up with an idea that students can simply confront and absorb great truths of life through situational creation. The description of an animal, k’un in his writing A Happy Excursion is the epitome. “In the northern ocean, there is a fish, called the k’un. It is so big that I don’t know how many thousand li in size.” (Zhuang 5) Zhuang Zhou wants to convey that spiritual freedom is the pursuit of human life just like the k’un enjoying itself in the sky. And he successfully reached the goal by the means of designing situations.

Until the 1970s, Situational Teaching Method was introduced to our country. The book Practice and Research of Situational Teaching Method, which was written by Li Jilin, is of great value to the educational theories of our country.

Another professor Zhang Jianzhong, he points out in his book Middle School Practical Teaching Method that the kind of language strategies that should be chosen during verbal communication depend on specific situations. Language situations need people, places, events, time, social culture and so on. All of these factors mix up in teaching. He supports educators to take advantage of modern teaching tools to set up situations and create comfortable and lively classroom atmosphere. Then students can be stimulated their interest in studying and improve their oral communication ability (Zhang 72).

To sum up, Situational Teaching Method requires teachers’ wisdom and materials to design situations. Teachers play the roles of story-teller and organizer, making students immersed in class. Students will drop the thought of memorizing grammars.

2.2 Oral English teaching

Oral English teaching is a part of systematic education. The formation and development of their logical thinking is very important. To teach oral English, teachers commonly take advantage of some textbooks and apply relative teaching modes according to different teaching contents. Then students will absorb and construct the knowledge in their own ways. Teaching activities such as free talk and role-play are critical in oral teaching.

Oral English teaching is special in some aspects. Firstly, the teaching content is rich such as organizing interesting activities in class and assigning different homework for students of different English levels. Secondly, a correct and scientific assessment system is vital for teachers to check out students’ understanding of knowledge and give them feedback in time. Thirdly, oral English teaching is a long lasting process which demands teachers to work out a teaching plan in advance and monitor the teaching schedule.

Nowadays, our country is aware of the importance of oral English education, which includes the renewal of teaching theories and high standard for students’ comprehensive quality. According to “China Standards of English”, which is a new policy adopted by the Chinese government, communication skills become a key point to evaluate a person’s English level.

Except China, oral English teaching occupies a quite important place on the education of other countries such as Japan and South Korea. Early in 2003, MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), which is an administrative organization in Japan, released an action plan for cultivation of capable Japanese. This plan is formulated for students in different periods and citizens without special occupations. It is in order to improve common English level of Japanese in five years or even longer.

In a word, oral English teaching is a “hot potato” to be handled. However, establishing education policies and perfecting teachers’ quality can’t be the only way to solve the problem. Students in rich areas accept English education in a very early age while students in rural areas can’t be treated similarly because of the special situation.

The Current Situation of Oral English in Rural Middle School

English is a social language. Until now, although our country has made great progress in English teaching, it still exists that students especially in rural middle schools perform poorly in spoken English. Therefore, here a question comes. What makes them speak “dumb English”? It will be analyzed deeply from three aspects —— current English educational system, teachers and students.

The flaws of current English educational system

Our country established the file, The Implement Opinions of the State Council on Deepening the Reform of Examination and Enrollment System in 2014. To response to it, many provinces and cities promulgate new policies of senior high school entrance examination. For example, from 2018, students in Zhejiang province commonly have an extra oral English test which accounts for 20 points in the final examination. However, as the Experimental Plan on curriculum of primary schools was released, English courses were formally put into the curriculum of primary schools from 2001. Until “dumb English” has been exposed to the society in recent years, our country realizes that ignoring oral English teaching is a drawback hidden in our current English educational system. It is ridiculous that the system of oral English teaching is still in an embryonic form while teachers are practical in integrating vocabularies and grammars to students.

Gu Mingyuan, a famous educationist of our country. In his article, Nine Causes of Educational Problems, he says that college entrance examination is a double-edged sword to many students in China. There is no doubt that the examination is a useful and efficient means to select excellent students. However, it is also the first trap students must get out of if they want to realize their glorious dreams.

At present, each province is ready to carry out the new college entrance examination. It means that students who began their study in senior high schools from 2018 or 2019 will experience a new policy. And the English test has great change. Students can participate in the English examination twice. Except the original written test, policies issued by some of provinces tell that students will have a oral test. For instance, in Beijing province, the oral English test and the listening test will account for 50 points. And the total scores of the English examination are still 150. Obviously, the proportion of the two parts is unbalanced. Oral English is the least important.

English educational system is the centre of English teaching. Nowadays, the system faces a great challenge that the system can make innovations in oral English teaching. Therefore, it’s a long way to consummate our English educational system.

3.2 The problems of students

Some students are in lack of learning purposes. Once a teacher, Wang Rei did a survey through questionnaires and tried to study students’ learning purposes. According to her illustration in An Investigation Report on the Learning Purpose of Middle School Students, there are 300 students involved in the research. 74% of them hope that studying English can improve themselves and 10% of them wish to be admitted to colleges, while the rest of them have no idea about their learning purposes. These students who don’t have learning purposes always tend to be absent-minded in class. And their attitudes towards doing homework is turned out to be bad.

Absence of family education results in few students’ weariness in learning. A professor, Li Yifei adopted the researching method of questionnaires to obtain data concerned left-behind children and the professor wrote a book called The Mental Status of Left-behind Children in China to analysis these data. One of the questionnaires is about these children’s spending time in reading. According to the survey, 10.5% of children hardly have reading time, and 83.6% of children spend half an hour to two hours in reading and the children who can read books for more than two hours only account for 5.9%. Part of children are lazy in reading books without their parents’ support. Except this, it can be proved that part of students in rural areas always skip classes and drop out of schools. They think study is useless. And because most of them are fostered by their grandparents or other relatives, teachers can’t contact with their parents in time to pretend their bad behavior. Therefore, family education is critical to children’s growth.

Besides these, inadequate basic English knowledge leads to students’ fear of speaking English. Some students in rural areas unlike the children who start to learn English at a very young age in the rich areas, they begin to learn English in Grade 4 or Grade 5, or let alone the students who never have English lessons at primary schools. So training oral English is tough for them. Mastering some basic expressions is the foundation of oral English.

Finally, some students perhaps don’t acquire skills in oral English learning. A teacher, Li Caihong, in the No.1 senior middle school of Jianli which is in Hubei province design some questionnaires to present students’ problems in learning English. The survey which is illustrated in her passage called Analysis and Suggestions on Current English Learning Situation of Students in Rural Middle Schools shows that 256 students participate in it. It can be found that 55% of them think their poor performance in English mainly due to learning skills. While asked about participating in oral English clubs, 46% of students surely say “yes”, and 37% of students are hesitant about it, and those students who are too shy to join in clubs account for 13.7%, and the rest of them are unwilling to take part in clubs. Therefore, in this stage, oral English is a trouble for them and most of them try to find solutions. A lot of students think learning English is difficult. They feel painful when they memorize those complex words and grammars. But students who can speak English fluently are proved to be diligent in practicing their oral English after class.

3.3 The problems of teachers

It’s teachers’ duty to cultivate and educate students. They inspire and support students to work hard and chase their dreams. But as we all know, still part of teachers can’t devote themselves into their career.

Some English teachers are acted by non-professional English teachers. Wang Shuxia, who is a research fellow at the Shijiazhuang Institute of Science Education did a survey about 323 English teachers coming from different rural areas middles schools. And the survey which was described in the article called Investigation and Analysis on the Current Situation of English Teachers’ Professional Development in Rural Middle Schools shows that 70% of these teachers graduate from universities, but 68% of them don’t major in English. Incorrect pronunciation and wrong teaching methods make bad effects on students’ oral English. For example, the pronunciations of letters “f” and “v” are always mixed by some teachers. Therefore, as an English teacher, improving their own levels of English should be given top priority.

An excellent teacher must be equipped with great determination. It is also mentioned in Wang Shuxia’s research that 20% of them want to be a teacher because of their love in education, and those who choose this job for stable life account for 35.5%, and 35.6% of them choose to be teachers due to the pressure of hunting jobs, and 8.9% of them don’t have any ideas about being teachers. But whatever reasons do they have, still 82.2% of them think they can devote themselves into teaching career. A small part of teachers has indifferent attitude towards teaching.

Teachers insist in their original teaching modes, which is a hinder for improving students’ oral English. Teachers-centered is the typical feature of traditional teaching method. Students never stop taking notes in class while teachers read the textbooks on the platform. Even though they observe that students are burdened by those boring grammars and words, they fail to change their teaching mode. According to a survey (Ou Yangdeshun and Zhu Chengning did the survey and wrote it in an article called Analysis and Solutions on Current Situation of Teaching Quality in Rural Primary Schools and Middle Schools —— A Case Study of Ningyuan County) of a rural middle school in Ningyuan county in Hunan province, 24.5% of teachers of this school could spend one hour reading educational books. And the proportion of teachers who can finish reading an educational book is only 20%. Quite a great amount of teachers doesn’t care about their professional development.

It can be proved that most of teachers take different attitudes towards students. For most of teachers, diligent and smart students are always to be the first. Ignoring or even looking down on those students of low achievement is generally known. And unequal treatment will make an impact on both students’ psychological and physical health. For example, when it comes to answering questions, some middle school students of Ningyuan county mention that they are seldom ordered in classes and teachers hardly choose them to express ideas even though they put up their hands. Gradually, the students who fall behind lose their confidence and are afraid of speaking. Teachers should try to treat all the students fairly.

4. The Application of Situational Teaching Method in Oral English

From the analysis above, teachers’ misunderstanding of English oral teaching results in students’ passive learning. Situational Teaching Method is widely used in all kinds of subjects. It aims to combine theories and real situations so that students can feel happy and relaxed in learning. More importantly, students could quickly adjust to the situations which they are familiar with.

4.1 The use of songs

Music is the most attractive art as to human. For oral English teaching, music is a quite efficient and easy method to be applied in classes. Enjoying songs in classes is a good means to relieve the circumstance and stimulate students’ interest in learning English.

The approach of using songs is significant in making students confront the current situation of our country and activating students’ sense of responsibility. For example, in the new term, if teachers play the song called Hello! How Are You? to lead in the class, students will immediately become relaxed in class. And then teachers can ask students whether they catch the meanings of lyrics. There is no doubt that most of students can’t grasp the correct meanings of lyrics in the song. Thus teachers are able to continue the talk by introducing the importance of studying English. Students could know a lot about the current situation of our country and the world.

Helping students’ acquiring knowledge is one of the advantages of using music. Just as Cyxomjnhcknn said, if teachers don’t manage to make students be in good spirits before teaching, then students just have indifferent attitude towards learning and feel tired about thinking.（Cyxomjnhcknn, 137） So it is necessary to stimulate students’ mind. And music can work. For instance, there is a unit called The Swedish Rock Band in the English book of the third term of junior middle school. The sentences of the article which describe the process of the band’s activities are all in the past indefinite tense. Students can easily make the tense clear if teachers present teaching content with some skills. In the beginning of the class, teachers could make students listen to a Chinese song, Yi Wu Suo You (一无所有). Students can naturally get the theme of this unit —— rock music. And then teachers can present another song, Yesterday, which is popular and beautiful. Students will surprisingly find the differences of the lyrics between the two songs. Students prefer to absorb new knowledge under the relaxed and lively circumstance.

Most students are fond of singing, so English songs invisibly bring them many opportunities to practice their oral English. In the daily life, students are exposed to the environment where is surrounded by Chinese. However, if teachers order them to sing songs, they will work hard to practice songs whatever they are easy or difficult. It’s the charm of music. Some phonetic phenomena are hard for students to grasp, but they will get deep impression about these rules through singing. For example, teachers can select some easy English songs like Proud of You and Lemon Trees for students to learn. The first lyric of the song, Proud of You is “Love in your eyes.” It is obviously can be found that the two words “your” and “eyes” need to be read together. And this phenomenon is called liaison. Then if teachers ask students what is liaison, students can list some words like these at once.

Music is commonly thought of great value to teaching which can link the teaching content with real life. Discovering the mystery of music and having a discussion with students are very significant.

4.2 The use of role-play

Role playing method was firstly proposed by an American psychologist, Jacob Levy. And it is a way of working through a situation, a scenario, or a problem by assuming roles and practicing what to do and say in a safe setting. Role-play is useful in strengthening friendships of students and cultivating their teamwork spirit.

Role-play functions in creating vivid situations. In the textbook English which is published by Hebei Education Press, there is a typical example about seeing doctor in lesson 17 Body Parts and Feelings. After students grasping the related information of the unit, teachers can divide them into groups and arrange them to read in roles. It is necessary to give students some pictures or other materials. Seeing the doctor is a common topic in daily life. So students are able to put themselves into the situation easily. Just like patients in the dialogues must be painful and unhappy. In the end of the class, they understand that taking good care of themselves can prevent them from going to the hospital. Therefore, role-play is a simple but efficient activity.

Besides this, role-play is beneficial in cultivating students’ teamwork spirit and sense of competition. When meeting the unit of family members, role-play is a necessary task for students. They are ordered to play the roles of family members and perform the dialogues. Since it seems like a game called play house. To finish the task well, every student in each group must make their duties clear. After several minutes’ preparation, students can’t wait to show off themselves. At that moment, teachers could use some presents like sweets and bookmarks to encourage them. And students gradually have teamwork spirit.

Freely speaking students’ mind is another merit of role-play. Here is an example, some teachers with great wisdom tend to organize students to talk about their imagined future jobs in the end of the class. Students’ passionate talking warms the class. At the show time, a student who wants to be a policeman may wear a police hat and proudly introduce his dream. A student may pretend to be a nurse and excitedly expresses her ideas.

An educationist pointed out that the best way to arouse children’s interest in learning English is role-play. Role-play is designed to satisfy students’ curiosity in acting different characters and serve students’ understanding of some teaching content.

4.3 The use of multimedia

As the name implies, multimedia is the integration of multiple forms of media such as text, graphics. Due to the advancement in computer speeds and storage space, multimedia is common today. With the help of multimedia, teaching content can be present concisely on the blackboard and students could easily construct a knowledge structure of their own.

Playing videos and presenting PPTs are proved to be effective means to attract students’ curiosity. It is also convenient for teachers to prepare statistics. For example, when teaching some Chinese festivals, teachers tend to make use of pictures and videos. Students are able to directly grasp the meaning of moon cakes and a big dinner through interesting picture or cartoons. And compared to the traditional teaching tools —— blackboards and chalks, students behave more excitedly in the class which uses multimedia.

Taking advantage of multimedia is beneficial to improve the efficiency of class. Teachers don’t need to waste time in blackboard. In class, to some extent, presenting PTTs which are prepared in advance and clicking on mice could take place of writing on the blackboard. For example, after having a grammar lesson, there is always a blackboard full of words. Students are busy finishing their notes and spend no time listening to their teachers. Although they take efforts to make notes, they completely don’t understand them. But now, key points are listed clearly on the computer. Students could listen to lessons carefully and complete notes after class.

Applying multimedia to English teaching could create more and more authentic language environment for the learners, which enables them to communicate in English. The task of dubbing is a good instance. Through imitating characters’ intonations and actions, students are able to deeply understand the images of different characters. Meanwhile, teachers could diagnosis and correct students’ pronunciations.

Nowadays, almost everyone is equipped with a cell-phone. And a great number of persons prefer to study English by downloading some applications like fun dubbing, fluent oral English and so on. For example, students are ordered to make up dialogues about greeting your friends in different scenes. As teachers know, greetings can be various on formal and informal occasions. Therefore, after inputting the key words “saying hello” in the application of fun dubbing on cell-phones, students can find that there are 25 results about the theme which including the videos of some businessmen having talks in parties and cartoon characters making friends. Students can choose one of these videos to practice with their partners. Making good use of cell-phones can not only enrich students’ basic knowledge, but also improve their oral English and diagnose their pronunciation.

Multimedia is the production of technology. There is no doubt that it is very amazing. However, it also has bad effect. Therefore, it is critical to use multimedia wisely.

4.4 The use of game activities

Game is a different kind of play activity. They are highly structured and include specific rules to be followed. (Spodek amp; Saracho 132) Specially, teaching game is one of kinds of games. Byrne gave the definition to games as a form of play governed by rules. It can be proved that almost every student likes playing games and their brains are “lighting up” during the process.

Designing games based on real life is a good way to consolidate students’ memorization. For example, after studying the grammar of the present progressive tense, teachers often make students play a single game called look and guess. Some students do actions and other students guess. Students are very excited when playing games. And it’s another form of test to check out students’ understanding of the grammar.

Almost everyone is naturally interested in games. Thus playing games in class is a conventional but efficient method to attract students’ attention. For example, most of people can easily get the rules of chain game, but few of them can win the game if they are not rich in vocabularies. Games like it can not only stimulate students’ desire to study but make them learn from each other. If teachers begin a lesson with a game, students will be excited to participate in class all the time.

When meeting key words which can easily confuse students, teachers tend to use games to deep their memory. “Finger show” is a classic game to speed students’ thinking and diagnose their acquisition of knowledge.

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