An Empirical Study Of Improving Senior High School Oral English By Applying Communicative Language Teaching

In English classrooms, the teacher is often viewed as the leading factor in China.The teacher asks his students few questions or has less communication with them inEnglish. In most cases, the teacher tries to seize each minute and as manyopportunities as possible to teach students the knowledge of English. However, thestudents’ oral English is far from satisfactory. Due to the fact, this thesis choosessenior two students in Xuzhou No.1High School as the research subjects and aimsto study how to improve oral English by applying Communicative LanguageTeaching.This study intends to solve the following problems: to arouse students’ interestsin English learning and enable them to be adapted to the Communicative LanguageTeaching; to investigate the current situation of Oral English teaching and attempt tofind some ways to improve students’ language performance in English class.There are five parts in the thesis. Chapter one is the introduction about researchbackground, purpose and significance of the research, research questions andframework of the thesis. Chapter two provides the literature review about thetheoretical background and both foreign researches and domestic researches in thisfield. Chapter three deals with the research plan, the subjects, the instruments, andthe experimental procedure. Chapter four is the research results, data analysis andanalysis of teaching materials. Chapter five is a general conclusion containing thefindings, limitations of the study, and the suggestions for further research.The research was designed and carried out at Class18, in Xuzhou No.1HighSchool in Jiangsu. Class18(51students) is the experimental group; Class17(50students) is the control group. Through the analysis and statistics of the data fromquestionnaires, interviews, classroom observations, and pre-test and post-test ofstudents’ oral English, this study draws the following conclusions:1) Almost half ofstudents are aware of the importance of oral English but they do not have enoughtime and opportunities to practice oral English due to the present teaching method.2)Though CLT shows no significant difference in improving students’ oral score, themajority of the subjects show greater interest in CLT. Their attitudes to oral Englishhave been greatly changed.3) The teacher can encourage students to practice oralEnglish and improve their language performance by giving more interesting topics inclass.