An Analysis On The Effect Of Cognitive Factors On The Teaching Of College Oral English

In English teaching,oral English teaching is playing a more and more critical role. However,enhancing the competence for colloquial expression is a long process.For many years,teachers have made great efforts to adopt various methods in order to improve the expression competence.But the improvement has been little.Faced with such a puzzle,what is worthy of discussing deeply is how to improve students' competence for colloquial expression effectively,so as to cultivate their pragmatic competence greatly.With the development of science and technology,cognitive science as the newly developed science has got a close and deep connection with psychology and linguistics. Colloquial expression is after all cognitive behavior and it should obey the cognition rules of human being.This thesis makes a study of cognitive factors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,with the aim in probing into the contemporary cognitive theory and applying it into foreign language teaching and learning.Through investigating university students' spoken English condition,the thesis explores the relations of cognitive factors and English scores, finds out the problems and tries to solve them.The purpose of the study is to help teachers and students find ways to improve learning efficiency,teaching quality and promote all-around development of the students.The creative points of this thesis lie in the attempt to search how cognitive factors work on the oral English teaching,and the effort to find a relatively effective instruction model to oral English teaching.The structure of this thesis is as followed:In the first place,the introduction mainly deals with the background,the purpose of the study,the organization of the paper and then a literature review of studying on cognitive linguistics and its present situation.By explaining the theoretical foundation of this thesis: constructivism theory and schema theory,the thesis applies cognitive linguistics theory to English teaching.First,it gives a survey of constructivism and college English teaching.Then it illustrates schema theory and college English teaching.At last it analyzes cognitive process in studying.In the second place,it analyzes the effect of cognitive factors on the college oral English teaching.At first it is the essence of colloquial communication and the study of the current college oral English teaching.And then it demonstrates the specific effect of cognitive factors on the college oral English teaching including psychology factors(anxiety factors),affective factors(motivation factor,self-esteem factor),cognitive psychology and cognitive context.In the third place,the thesis makes an experiment with the available resources under the current condition.The subjects are 200 non-English major sophomores in Northeast Forestry University.The methods of the experiment are questionnaires and tests.The tests and experiment have been done on the Experiment Class(Cognition Class) and the Control Class (Tradition Class).According to the result,the experiment examines cognitive factors working on the oral English teaching.The investigation results show that 1) quite a number of subjects' anxiety levels are high in the current English class.There is a notably negative correlation between students' anxiety levels and their learning achievements.The investigation results also show that 2) most of the subjects have obvious learning motivation.The motivations are mainly for passing CET 4 & CET 6,finding a good job in the future or going abroad for further study,etc.Meanwhile,many of the subjects are fond of learning English and interested in cultures and customs in English-speaking countries.3) Most subjects have a strong self-esteem and lack confidence in proficient oral English.4) The scores of Experiment Class and Control Class are similar in the pre-test at the beginning.During the whole semester with the cognitive factors' intervention,the performance of Experiment Class is a bit better than that of Control Class in the post-test.Finally the pedagogical implications for oral English are put forward and the conclusions are drawn.