A Study On Promoting Senior High School Students’ Oral Communicative Competence From A Social Constructivism Perspective

The goal of English teaching is to improve students’ ability to communicate using English.Through classroom teaching and learning, students can express themselves and communicatewith others fluently. Nowadays, the communication ability has been regarded as the mainpurpose of language teaching. How to gain this ability? In some way, it depends on oral Englishpractice.However, in some senior high middle schools, teachers pay more attention to explaininggrammar rules and usage of words in detail without referring to the context and most of thestudents are busy taking notes. At class, students just learn some of the knowledge about English,rather than the language itself. In this way, students can only receive the knowledge passivelyand their initiative is limited. That is to say, they have little chance to think by themselves andthe ability to create is limited. Moreover, it is difficult to create an active and lively atmospherefor classroom teaching because of the lack of opportunities for meaningful interaction. And someof students are not interested in English learning. It leads to a vicious circle.Getting to know these problems existing in English teaching in senior middle school, theauthor tries to change the situation. In order to explore whether the implementation of oralteaching based on constructivism theory would have a positive effect on improving students’communicative competence, at first, the author investigated senior high school students’ orallearning situation, then based on the theory of social constructivism, the theory of cooperativelearning, and task-based teaching, the author conducted a two-year teaching experiment in theexperimental class.Firstly, the author tries to create a circumstance that is suitable for constructing the meaningby the students themselves. Social constructivism believes that knowledge should be a kind ofconstruction through the interaction among different individuals and the cognitive process oflearners themselves. For senior high students, classroom learning is the main channel to learnknowledge and practice skills and their psychological and mental characteristics play a veryimportant role in their learning. So it is quite necessary for teachers to create appropriate learningenvironment for the students. In this environment, students can show their social behaviors.Secondly, the author pays attention to training students’ critical thinking. In the process ofconstruction, students should think by themselves rather than always follow others or listen tothe teacher’s explanation. That is to say, the importance of critical thinking cannot beunderestimated. Students need the ability to have critical thinking and teachers should giveproper instruction and inspiration for them. The author sets up many activities, such as class report, English competition and oral English composition. In a positive learning atmosphere ofclassroom, teachers and students show the stability of concentrated attention. In this process,students could have an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way, solve problemssystematically, get to know the logical connections between ideas and detect mistakes inreasoning. With the help of these activities, it is beneficial for students to construct.The participants of this research were104students of Jinan Foreign Language School. Theauthor chooses class13as the control group and class18as the experimental group. During theexperiment questionnaire, interview and test are applied as the instruments for collecting data.The questionnaire and interview are designed to investigate the situation of students’ oral Englishlearning. Based on the analysis of the results, we can conclude that students in senior middleschool have difficulty in communicative competence. This kind of ability needs to be improvedas soon as possible. And the lack of communicative competence restricts their development.In the process of the experiment, the author focused on students’ variation. At the beginningof senior one and in the end of senior two, the author gave a pre-test and a post-test to eachstudent. The results of the experimental group and the control group showed that the author’sexperiment was helpful and effective.Under the guidance of social constructivism, we should pay more attention to the training ofstudents’ oral English communication. Meanwhile, we should be concerned about students’emotional changes. And improving students’ critical thinking is good for them and they canbecome more creative. That is helpful to their development in the future.All in all, this thesis highlights the application of social constructivism into oral Englishteaching in senior high middle schools. And its purpose is to improve students’ oralcommunicative competence gradually so that they can develop better and better in the future.There is much work to do in the future to make further research on the application of socialconstructivism into senior middle school oral English teaching in China. My wish is that thisthesis can attract more attention to study oral English teaching in senior high middle schools.