A Study On The Development Of Students’ Oral English Under M-Learning

The present study is an empirical study concerning the application of M-learning to college English classroom,trying to examine the validity of M-learning instruction in improving students’ oral ability and how it affects students’ oral complexity in terms of syntactic complexity and lexical complexity.This study attempted to answer the following two questions: 1)Can the M-learning instruction more effectively improve students’ oral ability than the regular oral instruction in English classroom? If the answer to the question is yes,then 2)what kinds of characteristics do the experimental subjects’ oral productions have under the M-learning instruction in terms of lexical and syntactic complexity?Quantitative research integrated with qualitative research was conducted to answer the research questions.Sixty students were involved in this study,with 30 students in the experimental group and 30 students in the control group.The M-learning was high-frequently applied in oral English activities in the English classroom of the experimental group while in the control group regular in-class oral activities were adopted in the English classroom.The pretest and the post-test of oral tasks were respectively conducted in both classes to investigate if M-learning is helpful in improving students’ oral ability and to analyze the characteristics of oral complexity shown in students’ oral productions.Within the experimental group,the questionnaire investigation and the learning reflection were also conducted as supplemental materials to explain the effectiveness of M-learning in improving oral ability.The present study has made the following findings based on the data analysis: 1)The application of M-learning instruction into oral activities of English classroom can provide favorable effect on students’ oral English ability than the regular in-class oral English teaching.2)The application of M-learning instruction can significantly improve students’ oral complexity in terms of lexical complexity TTR and a part of syntactic complexity MLCP,but the measure of syntactic complexity SCT showed no significant differences.The study proved the application of M-learning instruction can improve students’ oral English ability and revealed its specific effects on students’ oral complexity.Finally,some pedagogical implications for oral English teaching can be generated: 1)M-learning should be fully and properly applied into the oral English teaching process because it can provide students with a great variety of learning resources and abundant language output and input.2)To improve students’ oral complexity through M-learning,teachers should strengthen the training in syntactic knowledge to help students to produce more subordinate clauses in their oral production.In spite of the findings,there still exist some limitations in the present study which may show possibilities for the future research.