| Oral proficiency of Chinese English learners is far from satisfactory. Even though many researchers have conducted a lot of studies in this field, these studies are mostly concerned with that of English or non-English majors at colleges. Less attention has been paid to the oral English proficiency of high school students’ especially to that of junior high school students.In order to fill the gap, this study is undertaken to investigate the effect on students’ oral English proficiency in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity by increasing the amount of their English homework. After the experiment, an interview for the English teacher and her students was conducted to see their reacts of it. Therefore, on basis of such theories as input and output hypothesis and affective filter hypothesis, this study seeks to address the following questions:1. What effect does the amount of oral English homework have on students’ oral proficiency in terms of fluency?2. What effect does the amount of oral English homework have on students’ oral proficiency in terms of accuracy?3. What effect does the amount of oral English homework have on students’ oral proficiency in terms of complexity?Research methods involved in this study are experiment and interviews. Participants in the experiment of this study were two classes of 82 students. Participants in the interviews were their English teacher and 8 students randomly selected from the experimental class. The instruments in the experiment were two speaking tests employed to collect scores of pre-test and post-test. Independent-sample t-test and paired-sample t-test were employed to analyze the data in this study.Some major findings can be drawn from this study:Firstly, increasing the amount of oral English homework has a positive effect on students’ oral proficiency in general. In the pre-test, mean score of the control class is higher than that of the experimental class; however, in the post-test, the result is just the opposite. They were at a significant level. After the experiment, most students who were interviewed welcomed this kind of oral English homework and they thought their oral proficiency had improved a lot. This result gave them more confidence, passion and interest in learning English.Secondly, there is a significant difference between the two classes in terms of fluency. In the pre-test, mean score of the control class is higher than that of the experimental class, while in the post-test, score of the experimental class is higher than that of the control class. It reveals that increasing the amount of oral English homework has a positive effect on students’ oral fluency. The English teacher who was interviewed also confirmed that students’ oral fluency had made great progress.Thirdly, there is no significant difference between the two classes in terms of accuracy and complexity. This indicates that increasing the amount of oral English homework has no positive effect on their improvement of accuracy and complexity. In the interview after the experiment, the English teacher said she would try her best to improve students’ oral accuracy and complexity, and strike a balance between the three criteria.Limitations of the study are listed as follows:Firstly, sample sizes of the experiment and interview may be not large enough to cover the situation of the whole population.Secondly, this study tries to investigate the effect of the amount of oral English homework on students’ oral proficiency in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity. The overall English ability is not explored.Thirdly, the experiment only lasted 7 weeks. The limited time of experimentation in this study cannot guarantee the effect on students’ oral English proficiency in the long term. |
