The Impact Of Frame-based Training Of Text Oral Retelling On Junior Students' Oral Expression Competence

Full-time Compulsory General High School English Curriculum Standards (trial version) proposed that junior high school students are required to "provide information on simple topics, express simple ideas and opinions, participate in the discussion, self-correct appropriately in oral expression"(level 5). But during English teaching in junior high school, most teachers focus only on English grammar explanations and teaching, rarely on the students' training of oral expression competence. At the same time, because of the limited class period, textbook arrangement etc, most junior high school students' oral English hasn't reached the prescribed requirements of oral expression. However, the English oral test of Senior Junior High School Entrance Examination of Guangzhou contains 15 points. One part of the oral tests is about oral expression (5 points). The students are asked to describe several pictures or a given topic orally in 4-5 sentences. However, some problems such as the omissions of given main points, disfluency in oral expression and so on often occur in their oral test. Therefore, how to improve the English oral expression competence of students in classroom teaching is a need to address the issue.The frame theory defines a cognitive frame in terms of a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality, or of a network with frame elements working harmoniously together. From a frame theoretical point of view, linguistic expressions function both as triggers to activate and as anchors to stabilize the cognitive frames on which meaning in language relies heavily for its generation. The author finds it possible to teach text oral retelling in a different but effective way. The study attempts to apply frame theory to text oral retelling teaching. An experiment has been carried out to testify whether the frame-based training of text oral retelling teaching in junior high school can improve students' oral expression ability.The subjects in this study were the students in two of six randomly occurring classes in Grade Eight in Tianxiu Junior High School in Guangzhou. The author randomly took one of them as an experimental class (EC) and the other as a control class (CC). The experiment lasted one term. The experiment instruments are the test scores in pre-test and post-test and the sample analysis of retelling recording scripts. The pre-test was held before the experiment, two teachers graded the recorded retelling scripts, there was no significant difference after data analyzing. During the experiment, the author did the retelling training in both classes, but in EC the author adopted the frame-based oral retelling training to help learners grasp the semantic frame, including frame elements and frame events. However in CC the author trained the learners to retell in a traditional way. After the training, the participants were tested in the same way. Experimental data of this study consisted of the recording and scores in two tests. Scores of students in each test were collected are analyzed by using the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) 17.0.The result indicates the frame-based training of the oral retelling can improve the content and fluency of the text oral retelling effectively, but it doesn't improve the accuracy of the oral retelling though, it improves the overall oral retelling level, it helps learners improve their oral expression ability.