A New Perspective On Oral English Teaching In High Schools Under The New Curriculum

The objective of Teaching English as a Foreign Language(TEFL) in senior high schools is to cultivate the students'integrated ability to use the language, on the basis of language skills, language knowledge, emotion and attitude, learning strategies and cultural awareness. The five aspects mentioned above are all elaborately illustrated in the newly-issued national curriculum formulated for senior high schools. Language skills include listening, speaking, reading and writing, as well as the synthetic ability of language use. In the process of TEFL, the focus should be on the development of students'language competence to use English appropriately when communicating with English speakers. However, in spite of the fact that the average level of spoken English nowadays has been impressively higher than a decade ago, their communicative ability in spoken English is still inadequate, in comparison with their ability of listening, writing and especially with the students'reading comprehension which is most remarkably advanced. Teachers have a long way to go to satisfy the increasingly need for our society to improve the students'spoken English. Meanwhile, measures should be taken to achieve the specific goals drawn up in the new curriculum.The author will reveal the problem which exists in current teaching of spoken English in the linguistic theories in terms of communicative competence. Through the review of the literature on the teaching of spoken English, the author puts forward the resolutions of improving the students'speaking skill, which have been proved to be efficient and practical by means of the experiment and by comparing the test results of the experimental class with those of the control class.This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One begins with the features of spoken language, then makes a study of the current situations of spoken English teaching in high schools. It also describes the oral English teaching requirements in the newly-issued curriculum. The traditional English teaching approaches and spoken English are also illustrated in this chapter.Chapter Two reviews the linguistic theories in relation to this study. It mainly refers...