1、an analysis of the problems and insufficiency in oral english teachingintroduction senior high school " english teaching syllabuses (陳道明: 2002) " proposes the main purpose of english teaching is to improve the ability to communicate in english, especially the innovative spirit and practica

2、l ability. with the development of global economy, english has become a kind of international all-purpose language, that is to say, it is an important political and economic resource. the basic goal of learning english is to communicate with it. therefore, speaking ability is the main skill in engli

3、sh learning. in recent years, with the efforts of the teachers, foreign language teaching in most high school has made great progress. meanwhile, students listening, speaking, reading and writing skills are generally improved. however, in the vast rural areas, high school english level is still lagg

4、ing behind. although many students have learned english for many years, they still can not speak english fluently, even to say a word when they meet with foreigners. as a result, there is the prevailing phenomenon of high marks but dumb english. after joining wto, the single reading talent has been

5、far from meeting the needs of modern society. students in rural high schools fail to reach the goal of communication in english and obtain information in english.based on the current situation, the author conducts an investigation among teachers and students in baoding rural senior high school. the

6、investigation takes juncheng senior high school as the sample, using a questionnaire as the main instrument to collect data. at last, the author analyzes the problems and insufficiency in the oral english teaching, meanwhile, gives suggestions to improve the current situation.i. literature reviewa.

7、the importance of oral englishthere is no denying that the process of global economy is being accelerated constantly when we entered into a new century. countries all over the world expand constantly in economy, culture, science, diplomacy, traveling etc. profound changes taking place in our society

8、 asks for more unprecedented, urgent and enormous demand for english talents. therefore, the demand of new age is far greater than that demand the talent who is just good at written english.english is not only a tool of learning, but also a kind of international all-purpose language, that is to say,

9、 it is an important political and economic resource. listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating are the five basic skills of learning a language. and the final goal of learning a language is to master the five skills. the basic goal of learning english is to communicate with it. but influ

10、enced by exam-oriented education in our country , generally speaking, the second skill ¨speaking” is the weakest part in english studying, and also a serious problem for middle school students, and even for the college students. students continue to memorize grammar and sentence patterns for a

11、long time, so students' brain has become a warehouse that is used to store vocabulary, sentence patterns and language knowledge, and they find it hard to communicate with others in english. so they often ask how to improve the spoken language. another phenomenon often shows that several more out

12、standing students keep silent in the classroom. the students with worse foundation become auditors; they do not participate voluntarily. many students go to universities to study but still can not say several english sentences. so it is imperative and urgent to improve teaching methods and students

13、interpersonal skills of oral english.b. current situation of oral english teaching the purpose that we study english is to communicate fluently with others. so fluency, accuracy and appropriateness are important in oral english study. that is to say, we have to pay much attention to practical c

14、ommunicating ability instead of only focusing on the grammar. so it needs us to know the rules of speaking, and the cultural characteristics as well, to express correctly and to use right styles under different situations or on the special occasions.due to the influence of the old english teaching s

15、ystem and the language environment, chinese students could not practice oral english and improve their ability of spoken english. in the old english teaching system, teachers always play the main roles in classes, and they focus on paraphrasing text and language points. though they do some oral prac

16、tices in classes, these are not enough to improve students ability of spoken english. students can understand english grammar, vocabulary and intonation clearly, but their ability of oral english is still poor. maybe they can say the simple english but can not express themselves correctly. a nation-

17、wide investigation shows that only 5% graduates in china think he or she can speak english fluently.there are many students have troubles with oral english. some students are considered the best one in his or her class, but they dare not to speak english when he or she talks with the foreigner who c

18、omes from an english-speaking country. the reason is that he or she is not used to speaking english when he or she talks to others. the students can not express what they want to say clearly when they talk with others in english and people around him or her can not understand what he or she said. su

19、ch situations are not useful to the improvement of students oral english. so there is no admitting to delay improving the ability of students oral english. we must find the effective methods to solve the problems as soon as possible.ii. research design and methodology in order to find out the proble

20、ms and insufficiency in the oral english teaching, the author conducts an investigation among teachers and students in baoding rural senior high school. this chapter mainly introduces the research design.a. research questionsthis quantitative study was designed to address the following questions:1.

21、how about the oral capability of english teachers?2. how about the learning situation of oral english among students?b. research subjectsparticipants for the investigation are 20 teachers and 100 students chosen at random from the juncheng high school in tang county, baoding, hebei province. the tea

22、chers and students from grade one are prepared to take part in the questionnaire investigation in order to acquire information of oral english on teachers part and students part. c. instrumentsthe investigation uses questionnaire as the main instrument. the investigation consists of two questionnair

23、es. the first one contains 10 items, which are all be multiple-choice, aiming to make teachers evaluate their oral english teaching objectively. it involves the following contents: the educational degree of teachers, the time distribution of different skills, the present teaching situation, the teac

24、hing resource and auxiliaries. the second questionnaire with 6 items is used to investigate the current situation of students oral english. it contains the attitude toward oral english, the current level of speaking, the difficulties of oral english study and the causes leading to the situation.d. d

25、ata collection and data analysisduring the investigation, the teachers and students were very cooperative and careful. there were twenty teachers participating in the investigation. and teachers feedback was all considered to be effective. meanwhile, we collected 100 pieces of paper among students,

26、of which two was invalid for the lack of answers to some questions. the rest of the feedback was considered to be effective and the valid rate is 98%.firstly, the author collected all the data of the investigation. and then descriptive statistics listed the percentage of each choice. finally, affect

27、ive factors should be analyzed. in this way, the author obtains the final results shown in the following tables.table 1 the educational degree of teachersaccording to the above survey, we find many serious problems. 70% teachers (about 14 persons) graduate from colleges. teachers with bachelor degre

28、e reach about 4 persons (20%). besides, there are 20% teachers who only receive technical secondary education. the present english teachers' educational level is not high, that is to say, the number of teachers with high degree is rare. table 2 the time distribution among different skillsin the

29、survey, most teachers pay more attention to grammar(32%), vocabulary(30%), and writing(19%) teaching. they do not have much time spending on oral english and listening skill. some teachers say current teaching materials content more difficult. in the teaching, in order to drive teaching plan so that

30、 there is no time to spend on oral english teaching. at the same time, exam doesn't test speaking ability, so under the guidance teacher only pay attention to what will be tested. so there is less time that is distributed to oral english.table 3 the present teaching situation 問題是一般不是您掌握的英語知識主要來源

31、于學生時代的學習嗎?51%23%26%您經常設計業(yè)余自修計劃嗎?15%24%61%您經常參加教研活動嗎?18%24%58%您經常用英語組織教學嗎?26%32%42%您在教學中經常以學生為中心嗎?26%21%53%您經常組織練習口語的活動嗎?13%35%52%from the data, we can easily find that english information source of teachers is narrow. 51% teachers knowledge is only limited in the learning at the student age. in addi

32、tion, only 15% teachers have further study plan to update their knowledge. because time flies, changes happen at anytime, and new things emerge constantly. obviously, english is developing with ages. how can old knowledge keep up with the new age? so there is a long way to enrich the knowledge of ru

33、ral school teachers.as to the scientific research ability, judging from the questionnaire survey results, only 18% teachers often participate in research activity. it shows that the rural middle school english teachers' scientific research consciousness and scientific research ability are genera

34、lly poor.as to teaching language, 26% teachers teach lessons in english as much as possible. only under the condition that the students couldn't understand, teachers will use chinese to have further explanations. 32% teachers usually use english at first. then explain in chinese. 42% of the teac

35、hers mainly use chinese in class. therefore, in the rural middle school english class, the teaching language also cannot guarantee in english. this phenomenon accounts for two aspects. on the one hand, teacher ability needs to be improved. on the other hand, students' english foundation is not g

36、ood so that they can not grasp the teacher. two aspects restrict the improvement of teaching language in the rural high schools. as to the relationship between teachers and students in class, 53% teachers think classroom should be teacher-centered and teaching should be the main part that controls e

37、verything in the classroom. obviously, these teachers are influenced by traditional education idea. only 26% teachers think students are the center and teachers should adjust the lesson according to the conditions of the students.in addition, only 13% teachers often organize the activity to create s

38、peaking circumstance. most teachers run teaching task of more than 3 classes, so that they think the teaching task is too heavy to have energy to organize some teaching activities to develop students' speaking ability after class. a number of teachers emphasize the school hardware and software f

39、acilities all outdated lacking of speaking conditions and atmosphere, so that they cant carry out activity to practicing speaking.table 4 teaching resources as to the teaching resources, the survey finds that most rural high school in hebei province uses the new curriculum. 74% teachers prefer refer

40、ence materials with the textbook as supporting material. teachers using reference material from online resource accounts for 10%, and borrowing reaches 12%. editing material by the teachers is nearly zero. current edition of high school english textbook is more difficult than the old from vocabulary

41、, reading, communication patterns etc. while the new edition put more emphasis on training comprehensive ability from listening, speaking, reading and writing ect. to accomplish the teaching assignment and achieve the default teaching effect, only a textbook is far from the goal. it should be supple

42、mented by supporting materials and advanced electronic equipments. table 5 teaching auxiliaries as to the teaching auxiliaries and helping means in the rural middle school, in everyday teaching, about 74% teachers use recorder as the main teaching tools. choosing speech room and courseware teachers

43、are 10% and 12%. choosing network is only about 4%. teachers said they face difficulties to multimedia applications during the teaching and have bigger problems in control the teaching material and using teaching methods. most teachers also say they seldom refer to network, newspapers, broadcasting

44、television and other media in preparing process. the figures show that because of restriction of the rural middle school, the english teachers ability of using modern teaching resource and equipment is still backward. table 6 the learning condition of students問題是一般不是你認為英語口語是英語學習中非常重要的一項嗎？21%33%46%你對

45、學習英語口語十分感興趣嗎？45%29%26%你對自己的口語水平滿意嗎？23%25%52%你能聽懂老師全英授課嗎？15%21%64%學校經常組織有關英語的課外活動嗎？18%35%47%你積極在課用英語回答問題嗎？13%35%52%from the above table, we find that only 21% students regard speaking as an important skill. 46% students can not recognize the importance of oral english and 45% students show less inter

46、est in learning spoken english. so we can see that students ignore the oral english learning. because of the lack of interest, from the above findings we can easily discover that 52% students are not satisfied with their oral english and lack confidence. having learned five or six years of english,

47、most students only can speak several sentences, even can not open the mouth. new teaching concept advocates the target language teaching. the data shows 15% students can understand parts of the english teaching, which reflects that students are lacking of solid foundation of english, which is worth

48、our attention and earnest ponderation. what is more, only 47% students admit that school seldom organizes activity of oral english. it reflects that school lack speaking environment. at the same time, there are still quite a number of students (about 52%) are afraid of making mistakes, or too timid,

49、 leading to dare not speak english. so the physical obstacle plays a role in practicing oral english.iii. results and discussiona. outdated educational conceptsthe most important factor is the chinese education system, which just severs for examination. as a matter of fact, most teachers, parents an

50、d students detest the examinations because it does not do good to the improvement of english in real sense.on the teachers part, the standard of the teachers working effect is marks. so in order to achieve high marks, teachers just focus on examinations and students also serve for this purpose. as a

51、 result, most teachers pay more attention to grammar(32%), vocabulary(30%), and writing(19%) teaching. they do not have much time spending on oral english and listening skill. because there is no examination or test on speaking, so teachers and students pay little attention to oral english practicin

52、g. they prefer to spend all of their time in grammars, reading, writing and listening to get good marks in examinations, thus speaking is neglected in class. after class students prefer doing homework. in this way, after years of learning, there is no great improvement of oral english.on the student

53、s part, 46% students can not recognize the importance of oral english and 45% students show less interest in learning spoken english. as there is no concrete demands in spoken english at all, many students have a vague understanding toward english. they just want to get higher scores in the entrance

54、 exam so that they can get chances to enter universities and change their destinies completely. gradually, they develop “mute english” without recognizing the importance of speaking. b. poor teaching conditions in most baoding rural high schools, teachers ability is limited. 70% teachers graduate fr

55、om colleges. teachers with bachelor degree reach only 4 persons (20%). besides, there are 20% teachers who only receive technical secondary education. from the data, we can find the present english teachers' educational level is not high. they are still carrying out the old traditional education

56、 method, which will not only make a bad influence on students speaking, but also an obstacle to listening. under that principle, teachers play a main role in english class. they speak too much for grammar explanation taking up most of the time. students, who are given few chances to open their mouth

57、 to speak a sentence, just make full use of their ears to listen to the teachers boring talking. in this case, students will lose their interest in english studying, or give it up. the fact that 42% of the teachers mainly use chinese in class will give a bad effect on students listening, meanwhile a

58、bate students desire for speaking. some teacher excuse that most students can not catch up the meanings of what they say if they speak too much in english. in fact, with the curiosity of learning, students will try their best to get the teachers meanings. when they confront some difficulties, they will ask others for help. a recent research shows that speaking english should take up 70%, so more english is required in english class. at the same time, the large number of students in a classroom affects the chance of speaking oral english. there are always more than 40 students in a chinese cla