An Empirical Study On Spoken English Teaching In Junior High Schools Based On Context Theory

In the period of English teaching in junior high school,listening,speaking,reading and writing are the four basic language skills that students need to master.Listening and reading are regarded as the input of language,while speaking and writing are the output.In the process of English teaching in junior high school,more attention is paid to the written English teaching because a great number of teachers and the teaching methods are influenced by the traditional way of evaluation.However,the spoken English teaching has not been taken seriously.As time passes,a large number of students will ignore the self-training and cultivation of their spoken English.Some may even think all they need to do is to get higher marks in the written tests.It won't make any difference whether they can speak English well or not.As a result,students show weakness in oral expressions.Some of them even fail to meet the standards of the curriculum.This thesis studies the real cases to investigate the spoken English acquisition of middle school students in Shanghai.Through the study,the thesis aims to find out the problems of students' spoken English and provide some constructive suggestions to spoken English teaching.Based on the fact that the application of communicative language always happens in a specific context and the aim of foreign language learning is to cultivate communicative competence if it's not for research,this thesis focuses on improving effectiveness and efficiency while classroom oral English teaching and learning take place in authentic context,which make teachers and students consider language in terms of the communicative functions it performs in real situations as well as its structures.This thesis integrates context teaching with spoken English teaching and makes spoken English teaching happen in situational context created on purpose.What's more,specific oral tests are applied to help analyze the teaching results.About the effect of contextualized spoken English teaching,there are three assumptions the author has made: 1)The contextualized spoken English teaching can arouse the students' learning motivation and interest.(2)The contextualized spoken English teaching can facilitate the students' oral task completion.(3)The contextualized spoken English teaching can improve students' language fluency,accuracy and complexity.Through the empirical study of the controlled class and the experimental class,the rational of the three assumptions is verified.By adopting the literature research method,comparative analysis,questionnaire surveys,interviews and other research methods,the author proves the effects and the importance of situational context on spoken English teaching scientifically.In addition,the author provides some constructive suggestions on spoken English teaching and guides the students to learn spoken English more efficiently and effectively.