The Application Of Recitation Input To Overcoming The Silence Of Spoken English Class In Foreign Language Vocational School

Secondary vocational education is an integral part of education in China. It undertakes the great mission that cultivates hundreds of millions of high skilled personnel. As one kind of secondary vocational schools, foreign language vocational schools mainly engaged in cultivating students'competence of foreign language plays an important role in the development of China' society and economy.Language learning involves the learning of language knowledge which includes pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and so on, and the learning of language skills, for instance, listening, speaking, writing and reading. The goal of English teaching in foreign language vocational school is to develop learners'ability to use English in all-round way, especially in listening and speaking. But most students in foreign language vocational school are junior high school graduates who fail to enter into senior high school. Their English is not good enough to meet the requirement of syllabus, which hinders their participation in classroom activities in spoken English class and results in the phenomenon of classroom silence.In order to overcome the phenomenon that students keep silent in spoken English class in foreign language vocational schools, the author uses the approach of questionnaire and conducting interview among students to investigate the main causes. The author wishes to search out an effective method to cope with this phenomenon. According to Krashen's Input Hypothesis, to acquire language, learners must be able to understand the input information. Therefore, language teachers should take great effort to provide optimal language input in the process of foreign language teaching to make students master it. Optimal language input has four characteristics:(1) comprehensible (2) interesting and relevant (3) not grammatically sequenced (4) enough. The features of recitation input accords with the four characteristics for optimal input. For that reason, recitation input can be regarded as an optimal language input which is very helpful for learners to acquire target language. The author tries to test whether recitation input is an effective method for students to improve their English proficiency, and prove that the advancement of students' spoken English can make them take part in the classroom interaction actively, which will help students overcome their silence in spoken English class finally.This thesis is composed of six parts:The first part serves as an introduction to this thesis, including the background information, purpose of this study, and its significance as well as the overall structure of this paper.The second part is the theoretical framework which includes Krashen's Input Hypothesis, optimal input, the definition and characteristic of recitation, and relevant researches of recitation, as well as general overview about classroom silence. Meanwhile, the author expounds the close relationship between Krashen's optimal input and recitation input.The third part is the experiment, which is carried out among the students of two first-year classes in a foreign language vocational school. This chapter covers research questions, information of subjects, instruments used in study, research procedures and the collection of experiment data.The fourth part presents the analysis and discussions of the research results which include the information collected in the interviews and questionnaires, and the data of both pretest and posttest.The fifth part summarizes the major findings of the experimental study and demonstrates practical implications.The sixth part is the conclusion of the thesis. It points out the limitations of the research and gives some suggestions for the future study.