A Study Of Oral English Teaching Directed At High School Students From The Perspective Of Language Fossilization And Attrition

High school English teaching plays an important role in materializing a coherentdevelopment of English teaching that runs the whole gamut of primary education,secondary education and tertiary education. Nevertheless, in a country like Chinawhere English can only assume a status of foreign language, how to effectivelyratchet up oral competence of high school students turns out to be a hard nut tocrack. This thesis believes that high school English learners are simultaneously underthe influences of fossilization and attrition in their oral output. The coexistence ofthese two phenomena has, to some extent, put the students’ oral competence farbehind their written skills. Statistics show that research findings are relatively scarceon the topic of high school oral English teaching in the arena of foreign languageresearch in China and that no comprehensive study on oral fossilization and attritiondirected at high school English learners has been conducted so far. Therefore, thisthesis intends to, from relevant theoretical angles and through an empirical researchdone at high school English learners, probe into the main reasons behind their oralfossilization and attrition, and based on relevant research findings, work out somesolutions.This research was conducted in a full-time high school in Shanghai, with an oraltest and a questionnaire as its research instruments. The oral test, with its dataanalyzed by SPSS, showed that students from regular classes exhibited oralfossilization with regard to articles, inflections of noun plurals and tag questions aswell as signs of oral attrition with respect to third person singular-s and personalpronouns, whereas students receiving additional oral English training showed notendency of oral fossilization and attrition at all. Based on the questionnaire results,the major reasons behind oral fossilization and attrition were reduced to thefollowing three points:1) the environmental factors—negative transfer from mothertongue and shortage of oral output opportunities;2) the teacher factors—backwardteaching philosophy, inferior instructional language and inappropriate assessmentmethods; and3) the student factors—lack of integrative motivation to seek oral improvements, reliance on translation in oral output and inability to automatizedeclarative knowledge. Based on a comparative and comprehensive analysis of thetest and questionnaire results, this thesis points out that the persistent oralfossilization and attrition phenomena should be tackled under the joint efforts byteachers and students. Teachers should try in every possible way to update theirteaching philosophy and pay particular attention to cultivating their autonomy whileat the same time seeking to improve their instructional language, more effectivelyusing multimedia resources and mending their methods of assessment. Studentsshould more effectively engage in aural and oral activities, attach importance tocultural learning and avoid thinking by translation in their oral output.