论文总字数：34060字

摘 要

随着改革开放的不断发展，英语已经变得越来越重要。相对于听力，阅读和写作，英语口语是的大多数学生的弱项。很多原因导致了这种现象。这些原因包括过分强调终结性评价,家庭背景,班级规模过大以及学生自身存在的问题.一些问题是由于缺乏重视, 所以我们需要改变人们的观点. 另一些问题是由于现有条件的限制所以很难克服.为了分析中学生英语口语学习过程中遇到的困难成因及其解决对策,文献资料法和举例法被运用进研究中。另外，为改善学生的口语能力，各个方面都会被考虑其中并试图找到有效的方法。

关键词: 困难；成因；对策。

Contents

1. Introduction........................................................................................1
2. Literature Review...............................................................................1
3. The Problems in English Speaking………………………………...2
   1. Too Much Emphasis on Summative Evaluation……………………..2
   2. Family Background………………………………………………......3
   3. Large Scale of the Class……………………………………………...4
   4. Problems with Students……………………………………………...5
4. Countermeasures to the Problems………………………………...8
   1. Applying Formative Evaluation……………………………………..8
   2. Changing Family’s Concept………………………………………...10
   3. Using Flexible Teaching Methods…………………………………..11
   4. Stimulating Students’ Motivation…………………………………...12
5. Conclusion.........................................................................................14

Works Cited……………………………………………………………...15

1. Introduction

China has developed a lot since reform and opening up, during which period Chinese economy has greatly improved. Many changes take place everywhere. China opens its door and welcomes all kinds of foreign culture. Besides, there is a boom in the foreign business in China. As a result, one of the most significant changes is that more and more people gradually aware that it is vital to master a foreign language, especially English, which contributes to the phenomenon of learning English crazily. On one hand, teachers and parents place emphasis on English learning, so lots of students try their best to learn it. On the other hand, lots of students long for learning a second language and its culture, some of whom want to go abroad to improve their English. Therefore, a large amount of training institutions appear. Especially in Shanghai and other areas like the south of Jiangsu and so on, where there is a large demand for people whose English is very good. People who are adept at English can find a well-paid job and live a very comfortable life. In terms of current outline, in four skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing, it emphasizes the ability of listening, reading and writing which is out of date in today"s opening to the outside world under the situation of rapid economic growth. In terms of students, as a result of the traditional teaching and learning mode, old teaching ideas are ingrained in the students’ mind. Thus most of the students are adept at reading, writing and speaking. However, when it comes to oral English, many students have various problems, one of which from the society is the single evaluation criteria. Besides, family background, teachers and classes, students themselves affect their English speaking learning as well.

2. Literature Review

A large number of researchers have done lots of research on the problems and countermeasures. In Fan rongling’s analysis of variables that affect spoke English proficiency. The author comes up with three variables including motivational variables, material variables and behavioral variables. In Li xiaofei’ research, the author points out that we should create better language circumstance to develop the ability in spoken language. Chinese research Qu lianlian analyzes some factors such as students’ emotion, teachers’ quality, the principles of evaluation that lead to students’ problems in English spoken. In David Nunan’s Practical English Language Teaching: Speaking. The author divides English speaking teaching into 3 tpyes including speaking for beginning level learners, speaking for intermediate level learners, and speaking for advanced level learners. There are different problems and different methods towards different level of students.

3. The Problems in English Speaking

3.1 Too Much Emphasis on Summative Evaluation

Since the traditional education concept affects Chinese people too much, the main way to evaluate students is summative evaluation which has a very influential effect on Chinese examination. The summative evaluation is the evaluation of the students" learning results, which is used to make the conclusion and judgment for the students" learning. It is the evaluation of the content which can be easily quantized, such as knowledge, skills, etc. The score is expressed by the accurate percentile system. It is often carried out in a formal and serious atmosphere, which is likely to make the students feel anxious, thus inhibiting students’ learning interest (Liu Jingying, 2006). In this way of evaluation, learning performance of students in overall development usually is not taken into account, which is the key factor leads to the ignorance of oral English, and the evaluation of achievements can not be true to illustrate student"s knowledge mastering degree and application ability and so on. In most of the summative evaluation, English speaking is not included in it which gives rise to inaccurate concept that English speaking is not of great importance. It is no wonder that individual’s English level only depends on the grades in college entrance examination. Most of the educational institutions estimate the school on the basis of students’ performance in the college entrance examination, which lead to single evaluation criterion in society. Many schools educate students based on the criterion which give rise to the phenomenon that school value the development of some excellent students instead of all the students’ development, and also school think highly of the development of some aspects such as reading, writing, listening instead of listening. Enrollment rate becomes many schools’ unilateral pursuit. Many schools can not see the advantage of cultivating English speaking in a short term, so they prefer to ask the students to do more reading exercises rather than encourage them to spend more time practicing oral English.

However, in terms of the reform of the evaluation on the formative evaluation studying western country, it started earlier than China, such as the research and application of formative evaluation in the 1980s and government attaches great importance to the research project on it. A large number of experts have participated in it and done a lot of researches. For example, the British assessment reform group released "for learning and evaluation of the ten principles of the formative study”. In addition, Dr. Gardner in Harvard in America used the formative evaluation in “Zero Point Plan” under his guidance. In 1967, Sctriven generalized the concept of the formative evaluation. Compared with western country, the time of Chinese scholars’ researching on it is too short. Consequently, many teachers are not very familiar with it, let alone employing it in education.

Because of all these reasons, most of the society members put emphasis on reading and writing due to the fact that they can make students achieve high mark which lead to the ignorance of oral English learning.

3.2 Family Background

3.2.1 SES

Family socioeconomic status, family"s socioeconomic status or household socioeconomic status, referred to as family SES, is the consideration of social and economic status of family members. There is evidence of a relationship between social class and students’ learning oral English. It is reported that there was a strong correlation between social status and achievement for English learners. Early scholars have studied the relationship between academic achievement and family background. The research of Hanushek (1986) found that the higher the parents’ education and income are, the better the students" performance will be. Many foreign scholars are eager to study the family SES and academic achievement (Teachman, 1987; Lindsay, 1991). Teachman (1987) believes that the higher the social and economic status of parents, the more ability and motivation to provide educational resources and to improve their education achievement. However, the fact is that although the economy and policy have developed a lot and people lead a leisure life, there are still lots of people, especially in rural area, are very poor, on which condition students can not be provided good resources of oral English learning and may even have a sense of self-abasement. Consequently, there is a high probability that some of the students are afraid of opening mouth to speak English.

3.2.2 Family’s Ignorance

Typical theoretical research, Wang, Haertel amp; Walberg (l993) also have done research on the relationship between family background and students" learning attitude and motivation, emphasizing family SES as an important environmental factors directly or indirectly influences academic achievement. Family environment can affect the children"s learning attitude, learning motivation and learning achievement, ambition and so on.

Some parents do not care about their children’s English learning at all, let alone English speaking. Students from middle-class homes regularly perform better than those from lower and working class homes. There are also class-related differences in the learners’ attitudes. Working-class children often give up learning English if they find that they are not good at it, while middle-class children may keep on working because they have very strong motivation and can be aware of the importance of learning English speaking.

3.3 Large Scale of the Class

As is definitely shown in the figure, in normal condition, with the scale of the class reduced, students’ achievement will increase. Language teaching is generally considered to take smaller class where about a dozen of people are enough. However, owing to the large number of students and importance of English as a compulsory course, our class has been on a large scale. With about 50 to 60 students in each class in middle school, many problems exist such as the passive learning methods, and dull atmosphere. The most important thing is that it is very hard for the teacher to communicate with every student to help them practice oral English due to the large scale in each class. Even though some teachers think highly of English speaking, there are limitations that hinder them from developing students’ English speaking. Large-scale class teaching is not suitable for teachers to organize activities of spoken language teaching for too many students in one class. One-to-one English communication happens in teachers and only a few of students and most of the students’ practice in the class is limited. As a result, many teachers feel that it is very hard to organize some interesting activities to improve students’ oral English. The students who are sitting in the back or at the corner of the classroom are often neglected by the teachers, and often are not willing to actively take part in the oral English activities in class. In addition, many English communicative learning activities have to take up some room, while the fixed crowded seats make these activities difficult to carry out.

3.4 Problems with Students

• • 1. Lack of Cultural Awareness

As we all know that language learning needs a good language atmosphere, and so does English speaking learning. Spoken English learning is a long term progress in which students may run into all kinds of problems, including the spoken English itself, oral communication together with language rhetoric, the problem of language symbols, tradition, culture, etc. In our country, students under the influence of traditional education for a long time have difficulties in receiving different cultures because it is very hard for them to understand the differences between different cultures.

There is deficiency in cultivation of intercultural communication competence. In oral communication, different objectives have different expressions. As a result of different cultures, even the same objective has different expressions. If students can not understand the differences between two different cultures, they will not grasp the meaning of British language based on the mind of western people.

3.4.2 Motivation.

What makes a student keep working hard and seldom feel tired? Motivation plays a very important role in their life. It is the students’ motivation, interest, ways of learning, efforts and so forth that decide their level of oral English. Many students are not good at English speaking due to lack of motivation. Psychologists define motivation as an interior process which activates, guides, and maintains behavior. “In plain language, motivation is what gets you going, and determines where you’re trying to go.” Robert E. Slavin.).

We can notice that the four parts of the motivation are learning reason, learning desire, attitude to learning atmosphere and effort. In Gardner"s motivation theory, the typical learning second language has two kinds: integrative orientation and instrumental orientation. Gardner points out that the students who are the learners of the integrative orientation have real interest in the target language for two reasons. "They learn a foreign language, in order to better communicate with the people of the target community, and have closer contact with the target language culture (Wang Chuming, 1990)". For the sake of instrumental learning, foreign language learners are concerned with how to use foreign language tools to find good jobs, improve their social status, pay and so on. Therefore, the integrated motivation includes the integration of the cause, desire, attitude and effort. Instrumental motivation includes the tool type, desire, attitude and effort. "Gardner (1988) believes that the learners who have an integrative motivation are likely to succeed more than those with an instrumental motivation.” However, the fact is that most of the students have instrumental motivation instead of the integrative motivation. I talked to lots of students so as to know how much time they spend on reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Among the 60 students in my class, most of them spend 30mins to practicing listening and 120mins to practice reading and writing. Only 3 students spend 20mins trying to listen to the radio or exercises with the aim of practicing oral English every day. The time they spend on each part is in direct proportion to We can easily see that most of them study English with the aim of achieving high grades in examination.

From the research on the school where I work, it is easy to find that some students who are very good at English work very hard because they have a strong motivation to learn. Some of them are from rich families where their parents can offer good resources. Some students, whose parents don’t pay much attention to their children’s education and may not offer good resources for them to learn, can not perform well in English speaking. I also find that after the school introduces some advanced facilities, more students become more and more interested in English class and they are more willing to open their mouth to say English in order to express their ideas, but they don’t make much progress in English speaking in a short term. The problem is that many students do not have such motivation to improve their spoken English on account of different reasons. Lots of students can’t persist in focusing on practicing spoken English in face of many difficulties. It may due to the social background, their family, their teachers, and themselves. After failing in speaking English correctly, some of the students may even develop into what is so-called attributive theory. “A central assumption of attribution theory is that people will attempt to maintain a positive self-image.” (Robert E. Slavin.).Therefore, if students perform well, there is a high probability that they will own their achievement to themselves. However, when they perform poorly, they can hold the view that it is others that should be blame. It has been demonstrated that if groups of people are given a task and then told that they either failed or succeeded (even though all, in fact, were equally successful) those who are told that they failed will say that their failure was owing to bad luck, whereas those who are told that they succeeded will attribute their success to their own skill and intelligence (Weiner, 2000).” (Robert E. Slavin.).

I regard a lack of motivation as the most important factor that account for the difficulties in learning English. When students lack motivation, they will lose interest in learning English. Many students, based on my experience in teaching English, don’t know what they really want in their future, on which condition the teachers and parents should give them proper guidance in learning English. As long as they have motivation, any difficulties can be overcome. As is mentioned above, many factors lead to the students’ difficulties in learning English. In other words, students’ low level of English results from many reasons. But the only thing that can change and improve this condition is motivation. That is to say, the students who always get low marks in English, if one day, they live in a developed city and their family are very rich, and their schools have very good teachers and advanced facilities, there is a high possibility that they still can’t make progress in learning English. However, if the students realize the importance of learning English so that they have the motivation to learn, they will achieve success in learning English.

4. Countermeasures to the Problems

4.1 Applying Formative Evaluation

We shall, first and foremost, apply formative assessment to the evaluation of English learning in order to avoid single evaluation criterion. Formative assessment stresses the importance of process; it is on the purpose of promoting learning and it is an important part of the current curriculum reform. With the increasing of oral English ability, more and more importance has been attached to the assessment to spoken English in the field of ETL either in middle schools or in colleges. Modern English highlights the instrumental value of language, and emphasizes the competence of using English. We should develop students’ oral English through an effective assessment because we all know that in china, assessment has a very strong influence on students. The formative assessment of English teaching is one of the best ways to improve students" learning English. (Jane, 2000) As is well known, the period of adolescence is the golden age for the development of learning ability. The implementation of the formative assessment of the English learning can avoid the phenomenon of the ignorance of oral English. Meanwhile, it can encourage students to keep on working hard on oral English learning.

A lot of methods can be used for formative assessment, one of which is the teacher evaluates students’ English learning through classroom observation and makes an assessment on their performance in which English speaking is included.

I can set one example to illustrate how formative assessment can be carried out to practice students’ oral English out in a class.

I used the task-based teaching method to organize my lesson. Before teaching the reading passage whose title is Boy Missing, Police Puzzled, I told the students that we would talk about UFO in class the next day. I asked them to search some relative information by reading materials in library or from the Internet to avoid that they would have nothing to say to practice oral English in class.

In class, I firstly play a video about the UFO, and asked the students some questions.

T: Do you believe that?

S: Yes/No

T: Why or why not? Give me your reason.

S: Human can not be the only creature in the world.

T: So what do they look like?

S: May be very strange. They may have wings and look like human being, just like Mothman.

T: Wow, so interesting. Tell me more about it.

Then, the students began to talk about what he had found from Internet and showed us the picture of UFO

After class, I will use a table to evaluate the students’ performance in English speaking in the class and give them constant feedback which is a good encouragement for them to practice oral English.

4.2 Changing Family’s Concept

Research shows that the cultural atmosphere of a family had a greater influence on English learning. If parents show more concern in learning spoken English, the middle school students" interest in English learning speaking is higher. Parents also need to improve their self-cultivation in order to give their children a hand when they need help in learning. Besides, Community and school should give guidance and collaborative to home education. If parents stress the importance of oral English, and employ effective educational method, in a large extent they can eliminate adverse effects due to the lack of family resource, then they will try to avoid taking negative parenting style, so as to create a better atmosphere for their children to learn oral English. We can take example by the British "Family School Association" to provide home education courses for parents. In the community service program, we can invite parents to discuss the issue of children’s education, thus to promote the cooperation between school and family, For example, low SES families and parents’ education level is not ideal, but after teachers talk to the parents about the importance of oral English, they can be aware of it. They will aware that it is indispensable for them to prepare the necessary tools for learning oral English, such as dictionary, a computer, a tape recorder and so on. Secondly, school can give educational lectures and invite parents to participate in it. What’s more, the establishment of school for parents popularizes knowledge of family education, so family education environment is optimized in a certain extent.

4.3 Using Flexible Teaching Methods

Towards the concept of reducing the scale of class, educators have been debating for a long time. On one hand, the class size reduction will affect the educational funds expenditure and the supply and demand of teachers. Obviously, the smaller the scale of each class, the fewer the number of students in it, then the teachers become more. Correspondingly, the teacher"s salary and welfare, schools and other teaching materials and equipment have to increase. At present, our country can not endure it because of the shortage of education funds. If possible, we’d better decrease the scale of each class, but in most cases, conditions do not allow. So we can only change the way in which teachers use. One of the main reasons of students’ inactive performance is that they usually just listen to the teacher and take notes. With few opportunities to communicate with others, they lack understanding of each other. Therefore, if the teacher gives students more opportunities to create more exchanges, such as to do some group discussions, role performance and other activities, can increase the exchange between students. The teacher who dares to innovate will not give up the lively and interesting communicative teaching activity because of the limitation of seats. Group activities can create more opportunities for students to use the language in class. With students exchanging experience and views, each student"s volume of speaking will greatly grow. Many teaching activities can take a group form. For example, students can be in groups to write a story, or to do a role play. They can be divided into groups to make an oral presentation, or to discuss a topic and reached a consensus panel. They can also make mutual evaluation and correct errors in the group members. In order to solve the problem of uneven degree of class students, Harmer (2001) proposed that sometimes students can be grouped according to student"s English level, so that students with different requirements can have corresponding practice in the different aspects of the language

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