Effects Of Reciting Listening Material On Vocabulary Used In Spoken Production

It is widely accepted that spoken language is the most important and difficult part in foreign language study. As one of the most effective methods of improving oral presentation skills, the role of recitation has been acknowledged by a large number of scholars and teachers. Nevertheless, at present there are two obvious omissions in recitation study:(1) Researchers prefer written-language text as the recitation material, and they ignore listening material. Speaking is a language process which includes two aspects--listening and speaking. The former related recitation study evidently neglects the positive effects of listening material.(2) There are fewer studies aimed at the influences recitation has on spoken vocabulary production. More and more relevant studies show that the capability of producing spoken vocabulary can be a scale to examine whether a spoken language teaching method is effective or not.By adopting a teaching method that combines listening material recitation and in-class activities on spoken language, the paper tries to study how reciting listening materials influences the output of spoken language and to find the evidence from the aspects of fluency, diversity and complexity of oral lexicon. The subjects of this experiment are 71 non-English major freshmen of Grade 2010 in Yanbian University. They are divided into experimental class and control class randomly. The whole teaching experimental period lasted for 15 teaching weeks. The experimental corpus was collected from oral compositions in two oral tests conducted at the beginning and the end of semester. Corpus analysis software Range (Nation,1990) was used to analyze corpus and social statistical software SPSS 17.0 is used to analyze and compare the data. Research result shows that:(1) In general, listening material recitation can also promote the performance of spoken language.(2) The influence on lexical fluency is significant and prominent.(3) Compared with the data of the control class, listening material recitation does not have an obvious advantage for lexical variety and lexical complexity (lexicon frequency distribution). As for teaching results of the experiment, we need further comprehensive analysis. There are still issues which require examination, such as the fact that the contents of reciting materials are not strongly correlated with oral composition topics, and students subjectively adopt avoidance strategy etc.The research on actual effectiveness and practical application of recitation teaching methods requires further in-depth study. Some advice is given according to this teaching experiment:(1) The level of recitation materials should be arranged from easy to difficult.(2) The delivery of recitation materials should be well-planned.(3) Teachers should work to develop the enthusiasm of students for both the material content and the topic of oral practice.