The Application Of Recitation Strategy To Oral English Teaching In Kindergarten Teacher Classes Of Secondary Vocational Schools

The new curriculum reform develops constantly and puts forward some new requirements to the modern English education. The National English Teaching Syllabus for Secondary Vocational Schools(2009) indicates clearly that the English teaching in secondary vocational schools should attach more importance to developing students' English speaking ability and associating it with students' employment in the future so that the graduated students can meet the employers' higher requirements in modern society and hunt for ideal jobs. However, the present situation fails to meet the requirements. As a matter of fact, the students in secondary vocational schools have highly poor English knowledge and a great number of students usually fail in the English exam. What they have learned is “dumb English” and their ability of speaking in English is very weak. Therefore, it is urgent to explore the effective ways to help the students in secondary vocational schools improve their oral English ability.The investigation and analysis show that the main reasons why the students have highly poor oral English ability are the insufficiency of English language input, the lack of English learning environment and the bad English learning attitudes. Recitation, as an effective way of knowledge input, is a kind of useful English learning strategy. Recitation input can facilitate the acquisition of language chunks, help the students enhance language sense, inspire the students' confidence in language learning and improve their oral fluency.It is necessary to point out that recitation strategy is especially useful for the students in kindergarten teacher classes of secondary vocational schools to improve their English speaking skills. On the one hand, almost all the students in kindergarten teacher classes are girls. The related research shows that girls have a better language learning ability than boys in physiology, which is beneficial for the girls to recite English—a form of language input. On the other hand, kindergarten teacher classes pay more attention to the students' development of expression ability which is helpful for the students to express what they want to say in English—a form of language output. Language input and language output both are important and necessary for the students to learn oral English well.In this research, the author intends to find out the answers to the following three questions:(1) what are the problems that exist in oral English teaching and English recitation in kindergarten teacher classes of secondary vocational schools?(2) what are the reasons that result in these problems?(3) what effects can recitation strategy have on the development of students' oral English? In order to answer the above questions, this research employs three kinds of research methods — interview, questionnaire and experiment. By means of questionnaire and pre-interview, the author finds out the existing problems in oral English teaching and English recitation as well as the main reasons that cause these problems. Then, the author designs an experiment and selects 100 students from two kindergarten teacher classes of Yexian Secondary Vocational School as research subjects. The two classes are parallel classes. One class is experimental class which applies the recitation strategy to oral English teaching and the other one is the control class which carries out the ordinary teaching activities. During the whole process of experiment, in order to ensure the validity of recitation and the reliability of the experiment, different means to develop students' interest in recitation, careful selection of the recitation material, various methods to guide the students to recite and flexible ways to supervise the process of recitation are particularly emphasized. Two oral English tests are conducted respectively in both classes at the beginning and ending of the experiment and then the scores of pre-test and post-test are processed with SPSS19.0. As a result, both classes' mean scores in the pre-test have no significant difference and control class' s mean scores in the pre-test and post-test have little difference, while the mean score of the experimental class is obviously higher than that of the control class in the post-test and experimental class' s mean score in the pre-test is clearly higher than that in the post-test, which indicates that recitation is an effective strategy of improving the students' oral English ability in kindergarten teacher classes of secondary vocational schools. After the experiment, a post-interview with five questions is conducted in the experimental class so as to find out the specific answers to the third research question.