A Study On Oral English Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

The ultimate objective of learning English is to communicate. Thus, to improve students'oral English proficiency is one of the most important aims of English teaching. However, oral English teaching has always been a weakness in China's English teaching, and students' communicative competence is still far from satisfactory. How to improve the quality of oral English teaching has become an imperative problem for Chinese educators to solve.From the perspective of the nature of communication, the author points out the importance of "active questioning". The author holds the opinion that successful communication involves a series of questions and answers from both sides. During this process, it is as important for one side to pose questions to the other about what interests him/her or what he/she wants to know, as to understand and promptly answer questions from the other. After referring to the literature related to oral English teaching, however, it occurs to the author that "how to ask" hasn't been laid enough emphasis on, which attracts her attention, because inability to pose questions will directly hinder students from successful communication.On the basis of the Input Hypothesis, the Output Hypothesis, Social Learning Theory, Motivation Strategies and Prefabricated Chunks Theory, in combination with her reflection on the nature of communication, the author designed a question-based oral English teaching method, in order to improve students'ability to ask questions actively, thus to truly improve students'oral English proficiency and communicative competence in the end. To put her design into practice, the author carried out a ten-week teaching experiment in Shanghai Nujiang Middle School, and achieved sound effects.This thesis elaborates the question-based oral English teaching method and the author's teaching experiment. Through the report and discussion of the results of pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaires, the author proves that her teaching method is practical and effective. She then gives some suggestions for other teachers to refer to based on her teaching process. The author hopes that this research can arouse teachers' and students' attention on how to pose questions in English, and shed light on how to improve students'oral English proficiency and communicative competence.