On Cognitive Theory And Oral English Teaching

With the social development and the increase of international exchanges, a higher demand has been placed on EFL learners' communicative competence. However, for the majority of Chinese students, English speaking still remains the most difficult skill for them to master. It is well known the oral English teaching has long been the weak aspect of our EFL teaching and its researches have not made remarkable progress as expected.With the development of cognitive psychology and further awareness of cognition, more and more researchers have realized that language learning is closely related to the brain activities and internal processes. The cognitive theory brings a totally new research angle to foreign language teaching. Based on the cognitive theory of language learning, this research tries to analyze the cognitive process of oral language learning so as to find out the corresponding speaking strategies related to the needs of learning process. An empirical study is conducted to 97 college students in Northwest University, who are assigned in the experimental group and comparison group at random. The purpose of the empirical study is to see whether students' speaking performance could be improved after they receive strategy instruction by means of collecting data from the posttest and questionnaires and comparing the scores of the learners' speaking performance, their awareness of strategy use, and their self-confidence of English speaking between the experimental group and comparison group.The results of the study indicate the significance of cognitive theory and the necessity of cognitive strategy instruction in oral English teaching. The author then puts forward the cognition-based instruction model and points out that cognitive theory and the strategyinstruction have important implications for the improvement of oral English teaching.