An Empirical Study Of College English Speaking Teaching Based On The Embodied-cognitive Narrative Model

Speaking is proved to be an indispensable communication medium for human beings to exchange ideas and push forward the advancement of the contemporary society.However,according to the present situations of college English teaching,students’ oral English competence fails to meet people’s satisfaction,and the improvement of this competence still remains a difficult and major point in current oral English education.From the cognitive view,speaking is not only limited to a linguistic ability,but more of a narrative competence related to human experience and cognition.In other words,speaking can be defined as a linguistic representation ability used to narrate the external events based upon human bodily experience and cognitive processing of the objective world.As regards,this study puts forward the Embodied-cognitive Narrative Model on the basis of the principle of embodied cognition and the Event-domain Cognitive Model of Embodied-cognitive Linguistics,and then applies it to college English speaking teaching.This research aims to enhance students’ oral narrative performance in terms of language range,language length and language coherence through promoting their cognitive processing of events in the objective world,and training their choice of words,construction of sentences and organization of discourses.This thesis focuses on the following questions:1.Can ECNM-based college English speaking teaching improve students’ oral narrative performance in terms of language range,language length and language coherence?2.If so,how does the narrative performance of these three aspects get improved?In order to testify the questions mentioned above,the author takes 30 college students with similar backgrounds as the research subjects.Before the experiment,the30 students accept the pre-test on their narrative performance in terms of language range,language length and language coherence.Then the author carries out three months of oral English teaching experiment based on the ECNM,after which the post-test results on these three aspects are collected.Through the descriptive analysis and the independent sample t-test analysis relying on the SPSS16.0 software,it is found that after the teaching experiment,students’ narrative performance in dimensions of language range,length and coherence had been enhanced significantly,among which the improvement of language range and language length is greater than that of language coherence.All of these can be explicated from the cognitive view,since cultivating students’ oral narrative competence by virtue of the ECNM can help students enrich their bodily experience and promote their cognitive processing of various external events to some extent,increase their storage of the hierarchical knowledge related to specific events,and enhance their oral narrative performance from three aspects: the choice of words,the construction of sentences and the organization of discourses.From the perspective of thinking,the Embodied-cognitive Narrative Model is conducive to help students establish a logical way of thinking in English,which enables them to break through the barriers of speaking in the narrative process,while forming richer,longer,and more coherent speeches.