论文总字数：44089字

摘 要

英语口语表达能力是由多种英语知识和技能构成的组合体。从知识的方面来说，涉及词汇储备，遣词，句子连贯性等。从技能方面来说，涉及思维模式，互相倾听和表达方式等。然而，对于中国的大部分中学生，在面临诸多障碍的情况下，想在口语表达上取得突破是一件极其困难的事。通过在当地一所初中初一的两个班级展开观察，本文将展示对学生口语表达学习中所面对的几个主要障碍的研究，并讨论一些可能对突破障碍有重大影响的要素。与此同时，本文将对针对障碍可能有效的应对策略进行探索性研究。

关键词：英语教育；英语口语训练；口语表达困难

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. Oral English Problems Facing Students 4

3.1 Oral English problems concerning teachers 4

3.2 Oral English problems concerning students 6

3.3 Oral English problem concerning materials and environment 8

4. Solutions to Different Problems 8

4.1 Solutions to problems concerning teachers 9

4.2 Solutions to problems concerning students 10

4.3 Solutions to problems concerning materials and environment 12

5. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 14

Appendix 16

1. Introduction

Oral English has been more and more applicable in dealing with world issues. With the development of China’s economy and technology, it’s a requisite for Chinese students to master accurate oral English. Besides, oral English plays a crucial role in the progress of students’ linguistic knowledge and skills in all round ways. According to the three key factors of education proposed by Chinese scholars (Wang 26)—Educator, educatee and educational influences, we should try to dig out problems students are confronted with from these three aspects. Obviously, most problems lie in students themselves because the ability of oral English has a lot to do with students’ capacity in learning English vocabulary, grammar and writing skills. So problems about students call for especial attention. Notwithstanding the truth that we can’t offer an authentic English environment for our students at school, there are still certain measures of which we can take advantage to help our students to cope with different problems about the cultivation of oral English.

2. Literature Review

According to John Dewey’s researches, “education itself is life”, which perfectly applies to the essence of oral English learning—Making oral English a part of your life. In doing so English can be spoken even like our mother tongue, and that will be a fast approach to the establishment of linguistic sense and usage.

Chinese scholars, like Wang Qiang, stress the issue of linguistic environment and practical communication. Wang Qiang’s theory is a typical epitome of the so-called “Chinese attitude”. Obviously his work will be of great value for our survey and verification.

A well-reputed theory proposed by Chinese scholars Wu Xudong and Zhang Wenzhong (Zhou 2)is the “Oral Developmental Model of Second Language”. This model combines the various internal and external factors of second language oral development into a systematic framework. It also describes the intricate interrelationships and effects between various factors. These factors include learning experience, learning environment, attitudes, motivation, learning strategies, language knowledge, and language proficiency. They are also the factors affecting students’ oral English.Generally speaking, oral English competence has two main aspects: One is the ability to express one’s own thoughts, the other is to communicate with other people. Both involve choices of words, the organization of sentences and expressive fluency, etc.

Much analysis has been done about these two aspects. For expressing oneself, many Chinese scholars, such as Wen Qiufang, Yang Huizhong and Zhao Xuexi (Zhou 2), reach an agreement on four key points—accuracy, fluency, structure and expressiveness. If one wants to express himself, the first thing to do is to set up the structure. Then he needs to demonstrate his thoughts with accurate and fluent words according to the structure. One more thing he has to guarantee is expressiveness, and that is to make sure the purpose of his words can be understood.

For communicating with people, a typical representative is Wang Qiang and her theory in A Course in English Language Teaching (Wang 216). In her theory, Wang Qiang describes communicative competence as an ability that entails knowing not only the language code or the form of language, but also what to say to whom and how to say it appropriately in any given situation. And Wang Qiang has also listed five communicative competence, they are linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, discourse competence, strategic competence and fluency. The unity of these five competence makes highly qualified communication possible.

Previous researchers laid much emphasis on several main factors that can make a difference to oral English learning, including students’ initiative, psychological adjustment, input of knowledge and amount of practice. (Hong 30) Each of them represents a different requirement for language learning.

First of all, appropriate initiative represents a comprehensive understanding of language learning, which makes sure that students don’t treat passing examinations as the ultimate goal of learning. Rather, students will see the practical use of language and the sublimation of their linguistic accomplishment as what they should woo.

Then, psychological adjustment represents favourable mentality. Students, or to be exact, every human will have a difficulty speaking a foreign language when it comes to real speech or talk. Inferiority, fear, shyness are inevitable psychological effects. Therefore, students must learn to make proper psychological adjustments to assure a steady learning process and mellifluous talk.

Meanwhile, input of knowledge represents enough storage of knowledge. According to Stephen D. Krashen’s “i 1” theory (Krashen 10), students must learn new knowledge which is at a higher level than their previous ones. New words, phrases and sentences must be kept instilling into students’ minds. Besides, amount of practice represents the application of theory to practice. It might be the easiest factor to be controlled. Contrary to input, large quantities of practice stand for output. As the saying goes, “practice makes perfect”, students are supposed to maximize their exercise to realize internalization, thus helping embed new knowledge in hearts once and for all. What’s more, abundant practice contributes to the agility and flexibility of real conversation.

Still, our previous researches have many deficiencies that can never be neglected. In the past, owing to the restriction of teaching methodologies and tools, we tended to find breakthroughs only from our students. Just as Wen Qiufang and Zhao Xuexi mentioned in their thesis (Zhou 2), students’ oral mistakes are quickly corrected in Chinese class, but sometimes the problem lies not in students, but in class model and teaching patterns, yet they didn’t make it clear how and to what degree the model or the pattern can affect oral English learning. Besides, they also talked about the lack of English teachers in many regions, but the qualities of present teachers seem to have been neglected. So, at present time, some issues beyond students need to be dug out and dealt with. During my internship at a local middle school—Kai Ming Middle School, several problems came into my vision.

The first issue previous research had ignored is about teachers’ effects, including teachers’ competence, ideology and teaching model (Hong 30). After listening to more than 20 English teachers’ lessons at Kai Ming Middle School, a serious problem showed up, and that’s the teachers’ regional accents. Most of the teachers there speak English in different accents, which are far from standardized English pronunciation (Chen 6). Meanwhile, many middle-aged teachers still use traditional teaching model like translation model, which is severely against modern teaching requirements.

Another issue towards which we failed to hold a right attitude is teaching tools, such as materials and the environment. In the past we used to spare no efforts to teach the content of our textbooks, and seldom do we take advantage of other materials such as movies, newspapers and the Internet (Cui 1). At Kai Ming Middle School, even though each classroom is equipped with projector, hardly can they be used by teachers, especially middle-aged ones. Teachers there rely heavily and almost singly on oral explanations. Nowadays, English movies, songs, speeches can all bring authentic English pronunciation and pragmatics to students, meanwhile creating language environment for them. It’s a silly mistake to count on sheer explanation alone.

Last but not least, with the development of our teaching methodology, a new phrase has come into modern people’s vision, and that’s what we call “thinking pattern”(Wei Zhang 12). In previous researches, Chinese researchers had little touch with this idea, thus causing a total overlook of its influence. But actually thinking pattern will make a huge difference to students’ learning of a language, especially oral English.

Considering all these deficiencies of the past, this paper will discuss their natures and try to offer suggestion on how to overcome them.

3. Oral English Problems Facing Students

The cultivation of oral English has been facing problems like vocabulary, self-confidence, coherence of sentences,etc (Zheng 11). Worse still, even though many Chinese students are adroit at traditional test-taking question types such as listening, multiple-choice question, writing and so on, it remains an arduous challenge to put forward the first step in initiating a sheer English talk with other people, especially in public occasions. Also, when it comes to class activities that require oral practice, a large quantity of students will be at a loss about what to do. On the one hand, they want to participate in the activities very much; On the other, they don’t dare to open their mouths to blurt out what they think (Song 2). Taking all the above factors into account, certain problems are quite conspicuous to find.

3.1 Oral English problems concerning teachers

The first issue to be discussed is teaching models. Chinese English researchers, like Wu Xudong, Wen Xifang, stress that English teaching has been focused on written form for the past twenty years, and hardly do students have standardized oral tests (Zhou 3). Due to the developmental request of our countries, traditional Chinese English teaching count on written tests to make selection of students.

What’s more, students usually focus on mechanical exercises such as filling blanks, making sentences or writing essays (Fosteramp;Skehan 299). All of them may contribute to students’ understanding of basic grammar and sentence patterns, but hardly can they make a difference to the cultivation of students’ oral capacity. Gradually, students become tenacious to written English and fixed expression form, but recalcitrant to authentic oral English. Under such circumstance, students will be stuck in Chinese-style oral English, and there’s nothing we can do to change the situation. Thus, traditional English teaching mode, despite its necessity for basic language knowledge, will be an inherent problem to our students if we just keep it that way.

Next, it is the teachers’ abilities that are going to be talked about. A teacher acts as the leading role in teaching process, which makes his or her professional standard particularly significant. Teachers’ ability will directly influence students’ oral learning (Li 10). If a teacher doesn’t possess eligible oral ability, then he or she can hardly teach students well . For example, a teacher with heavy Chinese accent usually speaks English characterized by his accent, which will make his words peculiar and hard to follow. When he or she talks to students, students will spontaneously imitate the accent. Some wrong pronunciations will be memorized and used later. It’s the same case with expression. When a teacher often speaks Chinese English, the students will absolutely follow his or her usage. The moment they try to express something, those incorrect expressions will appear again. What’s more terrible is that those expressions can be stuck in students’ minds for a very long time to come.

Besides, a teacher needs to figure out how to organize oral exercises, especially in rural areas (Song 2). It’s requisite for a teacher to understand what each stage requires. He or she must instruct the students to do the appropriate thing at each stage. Oral practice is supposed to be ‘student-oriented.’ Teachers need to offer more freedom to students to keep them engaged (Zheng 19). Only in doing so can the teaching effects be maximized. We can’t imagine how students could get the right training if their teacher doesn’t even know the right thing to do. So, teachers failing to meet the standard will eventually become problems for students in learning oral English.

3.2 Oral English problems concerning students

The first problem worthy to be studied is students’ vocabulary. The well-known Cooperative Principle proposed by linguist Herbert Paul Grice suggests that when communicating with other people, the Maxim of Manner is often required. But this maxim is usually violated because of wrong choices of words and phrase, which is mostly caused by limited vocabulary and sentence structures. It also leads to students’ oral problems in daily learning.

Vocabulary is the basis of almost every single language (Wang 165). When we try to express what we are thinking about in English, the first thing to do is to choose the counter words to Chinese. However, for most middle and high school students, their lexical storage is very limited. Students know little about words beyond textbooks (Wang 179). According to High school English curriculum standard, the number of word students are supposed to master is only 3500, most of them being academic words. Still, what students need to learn is more than just these words but together with their collocations. Sadly, the inescapable fact is that students usually have difficulty applying academic words to practical use because they fail to find the exact English counterparts.

For example, if a student wants to say ‘write an essay’, then probably he or she will waver over using ‘essay’ or ‘article’ or ‘composition’. Slight differences between similar words are often ignored during their learning process, which makes it a delicate task to choose the exact word. Take another one, if a student wants to express ‘to park a car’, then he or she will have to distinguish whether it’s ‘pull over’ or ‘pull up’ that is going to be used. There will be many occasions like that where students can’t make out the right collocation, thus failing to make correct expressions.

The second aspect concerning students is thinking patterns. The problem of thinking pattern is represented by the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. “In different cultures, the differences in the structure, meaning, and use of different languages have greatly affected the way users think.” In other words, thinking patterns, on the other hand, greatly affect the way people speak. Thus, students’ Chinese thinking pattern will be an problem to their oral English.

Usually, Western thinking pattern pays more attention to things when it comes to dealing with the relationship between people and things (Wei Zhang 2). Western thinking pattern starts from one particular part, then to other parts, and at last to the entity. Comparatively, Chinese thinking pattern focuses more on people and starts from the entity to parts. So, when we try to express something in English, the transfer from Chinese thinking pattern to Western thinking pattern must be taken into account.

Meanwhile, Chinese thinking pattern is often experience-oriented and inductive, while that of the west is often logic-oriented and deductive (Wei Zhang 2). For example, if a Chinese student wants to say ‘Can you help me with the problem which I can not deal with?’, then what he or she actually says will probably be ‘I have a problem which I can not deal with, and I need your help.’ Grammatically it doesn’t have any mistake, but it fails to conform to Western people’s thinking patterns, thus failing to extrude the urgency of needing help from the listeners.

Then, a typical example is that in Chinese thinking patterns, reason is prior to result. On the contrary, result precedes reason in the west. That’s why we will have situations like this:

(1) He didn’t come because it snowed.

(2) Because it snowed he didn’t come.

Sentence (2) is a typical Chinese expression. Even though it won’t give rise to any difficulty in understanding, the sentence itself is devoid of authenticity. So, in all, different thinking patterns is a problem that requires attention in English speaking.

Another problem that can never be neglected is psychological factors. Chinese scholar Tao Xingzhi mentioned in his work The Transformation of Chinese Education that traditional Chinese education used to force students to finish tasks without considering their psychological bearing, while actually students’ psychologies greatly affect their performance. He also talked about that psychology will influence student both in class and outside class. Judging from that, we could draw the conclusion that psychological factors will make a difference to Chinese students’ oral English in the same way (Tao 54).

The three main psychological factors studied by Tao Xingzhi are as follows:1.The individual"s efforts and expected goals are quite different; 2.The environment restricts students" learning emotions and enthusiasm; 3.Individual emotional factors lead to students" output problems. After Swain’s ‘psychological linguistic’ in 1985 was proposed, modern people began to discuss what effects psychology could have. For example, looking at others in the eyes can make students feel nervous if it lasts for a long time, while temporarily put their eyes somewhere else might make both they and their listeners uncomfortable (Chen 11). In that occasion, students will have a hard time choosing the appropriate place, which makes them unable to concentrate on what they are going to talk about. It’s a sort of distraction that students can hardly get rid of.

3.3 Oral English problem concerning materials and environment

Lack of materials is exerting more and more negative influences on students. Social media and newspapers or even story books can influence students’ oral learning in terms of vocabulary input and pragmatics, as has been emphasized by Krashen’s Input hypothesis. Krashen said that input needs to be diverse and from all possible sources. But for Chinese students, direct materials such as film and television materials are rarely used in middle school oral English teaching, compared with other conventional oral teaching methods such as textbooks (Zhang 4). Most of our learning is exercise-oriented in terms of reading writing or listening. Thus, Chinese students have little material resources for their oral training.

Meanwhile, environment also plays a significant role in students learning. Noam Chomsky and his Language Acquisition Device describes environment as a tool to trigger language acquisition mechanism. Environment plays the role of establishing linguistic basis in language acquisition.

However, our language environment is totally different from that of English, which makes it almost impossible to establish English linguistic basis for our students.

The result is that most Chinese students in middle and high schools fail to cultivate authentic English pronunciation and pragmatic use, and that’s what makes their oral English sounds quite odd and hard to understand.

4. Solutions to Different Problems

Chinese English educators like Wang Qiang, Wu Xudong (Wang 113), have once discussed how to deal with these oral English problems. These solutions must be designed according to the drawbacks of every single problem. What’s more, considering our students’ cognitive characteristics, all the solutions need to be convenient to operate.

4.1 Solutions to problems concerning teachers

Traditional English teaching model, as is discussed above, tends to focus on written exercise in learning oral English. Modern teachers have much to do in changing their teaching models, just as Wang Qiang puts it in her course—In traditional lessons, when a student makes a oral mistake, the teacher will stop him or her and correct the mistake in no time (Wang 122). However, even though stopping the student ensures fast correction, the fluency, coherence and cohesion of speaking will be heavily affected. So teachers need to pay attention to fluency rather than accuracy. In oral practice, let students finish speaking whatever mistake they might make. Keep their mistakes in mind, and after they finish speaking completely, help them to correct all the mistakes. In doing so, students will have better feelings and thoughts of oral practice.

In order to test the differences modern mode can make to students, during my internship in Kai Ming Middle School, I carried out an observation on two grade 1 classes that are at about the same level. The results did explain something. The lesson I gave to both classes was about general interrogative sentence. At the end of the class, students are supposed to be able to master the structure and form of it. Besides, correct usage is also demanded. To the first class, I taught the lesson in the manner of traditional translation. After multiplied explanations of the knowledge points in Chinese, I asked students to do some exercises to consolidate what they just learned. Then, some students were invited to make dialogues to ensure proper usage. That’s what the first lesson was like. Meanwhile, when I was going to give the second lesson, I chose to show a video clip of the film Harry Potter to arouse students’ interests. And the language points were demonstrated by the words spoken by the characters. After the clip is done, I required students to summarize the rule of general interrogative sentence. Surprisingly, many students were able to make it. What’s more, the next day when I asked them to explain and use the knowledge, the disparity was extremely conspicuous. Hardly can class one students do as I told, but it’s hardly a challenge for class two students.

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