Original Analysis On The Speech Difficulty Of Chinese-Speaking EFL Learners

Bits and pieces of criticisms have been continuously pouring on poor speech performance of Chinese-speaking EFL learners, especially of those who are in their university studies. Researches have been executed by many scholars to investigate the casual linguistic factors, and they attribute this predicament to the factors like input, output, context, teachers, learning materials and the like, however the interpretability based on linguistic factors without the consideration of psychological elements in the speech production is in part feasibly resolvable to this practical predicament in that language is the product of mind (Selinger,1990). Studies in the field of linguistics, psycholinguistics and bilingualism have all reached unanimous conclusions that non-balanced bilinguals (EFL learners) share a common conceptual representational system while their lexical representational systems are independent. Therefore their language production incorporates code-switching in the mind. Consequently the compatibility of form and function turns to that of native language function and foreign language form. Due to dramatic distinction in vocabulary, morphology, usage and function existing in these two languages, there seldom exists one-to-one compatibility. Distribution to one task too much will inevitably exert negative effects on the successful exertion of the other nonautomatic task occurring at the same time for man's limited attention span. In short, dramatic differences in many aspects between these two languages will influence the distribution of limited attention span, which will result in incompatibility of native language function and foreign language form as the real underlying origins of poor speech performance of Chinese-speaking EFL learners. Then an experimental study was carried out, whose result lent support to the hypothesis that learners with higher language proficiency made shorter and also less frequent pauses than the lower ones due to limited language competence and consequent hindrance of code-switching in the mind. Accordingly, the feasible solution to the poor speech performance on the part of Chinese-speaking English learners is not that listening and speaking should take priority to reading and writing, but they should be much more exposed to the target language and develop comprehensive language competence incessantly, in addition to contrastive classroom instructions between these two languages English and Chinese.The thesis consists of seven parts. It begins with a general introduction to the background, purpose and significance of the study. Followed with this, the second part reviews the related literature both at home and abroad, introducing its essential viewpoints of their research as well as its theoretical and practical weakness. Then the third part illustrates the conceptual framework for the study with reference to the achievements in the field of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and bilingualism research. The experimental research constructs the fourth part. The fifth part makes an analysis on the data collected and comes to the conclusion inferring from the research. The practical implications of the present research are presented in the sixth part. And the thesis ends with the seventh part, introducing the limitations of the present research and the future directions.