辩论活动对非英语专业学生做英语presentation的能力的影响的探究

论文总字数：58034字

摘 要

学习迁移是指个人已获得的知识和技能对新情境下中的问题解决产生的影响。当今社会中，生活压力与竞争压力日趋激烈，时代的发展对个人的高效自主学习提出了更高的要求。同时，英语在大学教育与国际知识中占据主导地位。因此学习迁移在英语教学中的有效运用显得尤为重要。辩论是大学中常见的以中文为媒介的课外活动，其对于学生语言能力、逻辑能力和思辨能力等的提高都大有裨益。英语课堂展示（presentation）则是在大学英语课堂中广泛应用的教学手段，同时也是教学目标之一，它是学生语言能力与文化知识的体现。鉴于辩论与课堂展示在能力要求和展现形式上都颇为相似，二者之间存在迁移的可能性较高。本文以东南大学的非英语专业学生暨辩论队成员为研究对象，探究大学中的中文辩论对学生英语展示的表现产生何种影响，并探究这种影响对英语学习与教学的现实意义。

本研究以访谈的形式开展，共十名参与者，均为东南大学大一大二的学生。研究者询问了这些学生关于辩论与英语展示的相关问题，包括如何接触到二者、有关二者的经历与体会、对二者的看法及思考等。通过访谈，本研究得出三方面中文辩论对英语课堂展示的影响，列举如下：第一，英语词汇量增大，词汇准确度提高，在做英语展示时可以更加得心应手地选择词汇；第二，演讲技巧提高了，在与观众互动和管理良好的形象方面都更加自如；第三，自我认知发生变化。由于在辩论活动中的出色表现，学生在做英语课堂展示时明显展现中更多自信，学生对自我表现的期待变高，同时老师对此生做英语展示的要求也变高。

根据研究成果，本研究现就大学英语课程改革方面提出两方面建议：第一，鼓励并引导学生在课外活动中学习知识，锻炼能力；第二，在设计大学英语课程时拓宽思路，将课外活动与实践纳入课堂设计。

关键词：学习迁移；中文辩论；英语课堂展示；大外教学

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Background 1

1.2 Significance of the Study 2

1.3 Overview of the Thesis 3

Chapter Two Literature Review 5

2.1 Debate Activities among College Students 5

2.2 The Importance of Presentations to English Instruction 6

2.3 Transfer of Knowledge and Skills Across Languages 7

Chapter Three Methodology 10

3.1 Research Questions 10

3.2 Setting 10

3.3 Participants 11

3.4 Researcher Positionality 12

3.5 Data Collection and Analysis 13

Chapter Four Findings 14

4.1 Impacts on Non-English Majors’ Choices of Words 14

4.2 Impacts on Non-English Majors’ Non-verbal Skills 18

4.3 Impacts on Non-English Majors’ Self-consciousness 21

Chapter Five Discussions and Conclusion 24

References 26

Appendix 29

Chapter One Introduction

Transfer of learning permeates every level of life. It refers to the impact that knowledge or abilities acquired in one area has on problem solving or knowledge acquisition in other areas. It also means that knowledge or skills encapsulated in one language could be manifested or applied in another language. Debate is a common Chinese-based extracurricular activity at university. Presentation is a popular form of learning and evaluative methods of English at college English classes. The ability and knowledge students gain through the former affect their performance in the latter. The thesis centers on the impact of Chinese debate activities (eg., debate competitions) on English presentation skills among non-English majors of Southeast University, and the relevance of such findings to English learning and teaching.

1.1 Background

The two prominent facts that prompt this thesis study are the increasing importance of transfer of knowledge and the dominant role of English in the international knowledge and educational systems.

First, with the growth of cut-throat competition in our society, an individual should possess the ability of self-regulated learning to satisfy the demands of new era. In order to achieve the lifelong development of students, the goal of undergraduate cultivation is supposed to be the ability to apply knowledge and skills flexibly.The training of ability in transference of learning, for instance, the application of knowledge and skills across languages, contributes to students’ core competence, and lays a good foundation for their lifelong learning and all-round development.

Second, as currently the most widely-used language all over the world, English is an important tool for international communication and cultural exchange. People from different countries and regions are closely linked by economic globalization and scientific and technological advancement today. It is not too much to say that English is regarded as one of the indispensable skills of non-English majors in modern society.

According to The Outline of National Medium-and Long-Term Program for Education Reform and Development (2010-2020), improving the quality is the core task of the development of higher education. As stipulated in College English Syllabus (2017), the aims of college English teaching are the cultivation of students’ comprehensive ability to use English and development of their cross-cultural awareness and intercultural communication competence. The learners are expected to use English effectively in their study, life, social interaction and future work, meeting the needs of national, social, scholastic and personal development.

Summary, statement, report and demonstration of practice and research projects are collectively called “presentation” in English. Presentation is regarded as one of the essential training and evaluative methods of English teaching. However, delivering English presentations is quite challenging for the vast majority of non-English majors, especially those who have just entered college. In terms of language skills, popular mistakes are: poor pronunciation, too many sophisticated sentences, improper choices of words and so on. In terms of non-linguistic factors, there are inefficient and perfunctory group preparation, misunderstanding of the given topics and so on.

Given the importance of learning transference, this thesis focuses on how could skills from one type of central extra-curricular activity — debates in Chinese — be transferred to English language learning, especially, presentations.

1.2 Significance of the Study

This study contributes to existing literature on English teaching and learning in two ways:

First, this study discusses how non-English majors can improve their English presentation performance, which is conductive to achieving the ultimate goal of English learning, by participating in Chinese debate activities.Students poor performance in English presentations could be attributed to multiple reasons, one of which is the lack of advisable learning methods. The positive impacts of Chinese debates on English presentation skills open up a new, effective means of language learning. Owning the riveting and inclusive nature of debate activities, students are likely to get involved. What they practice in Chinese debates will be transferred to English learning, and students will grow in terms of self-discipline, English learning motivation, strategies and proficiency. Their skills and performances of English presentations will be boosted eventually.

Second, this study should be seen as an attempt to broaden the view of curriculum. Traditionally, English learning is perceived as a narrow input-output process that occurs within an individual. In order for this individual to stay “on task”, English curriculum centers on activities involving only English, such as speaking, listening, reading and writing in English. In this study, an English learner is perceived as a social being, whose experiences and activities in one seemingly irrelevant social realm might have significant bearings on learning in another area. This provides new ideas and directions for curriculum design in teaching college English. First, students’ learning outside of classrooms on their own initiative should be stressed as significant and indispensable complementary components to their classroom learning. Second, extra-curricular activities should be incorporated and expanded in formal schooling, as the development of students as social beings has relevance to the processes and outcomes of second language learning.

1.3 Overview of the Thesis

In light of the background and the significance, the research will examine the impacts of Chinese debate activities on English presentation skills through interviewing non-English-major debaters at Southeast University. The thesis has four chapters in addition to this introductory chapter. Chapter two is the literature review in which I introduce three central concepts on which the empirical investigation of this thesis is predicated: debates as a central extra-curricular activity, the importance of presentations to English instruction, and transference of knowledge and skills across language. In the third chapter, I will explicate in great detail the interview method of the research, including research questions, the setting and the participants, my positionality, and data collection and analysis. The fourth chapter is the findings of this interview study, in which I present data pertaining to knowledge and skill transference from Chinese debates to English presentations, namely, how non-English majors improve their vocabularies, non-verbal skills and self-knowledge as a consequence of participation in Chinese debates. In the final chapter, I unravel the practical implications of the findings of this interview study.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Debate Activities among College Students

The large-scale and systematic research on contemporary debating is mainly carried out by scholars in the United States. So far, the concept of debates involves three implications: argumentation, arguing and competitive debates. In this thesis, debates refer to the last one, which are a kind of arguing competition with high formality (Pfau, Thomas, and Ulrich, 1987), since debates have clear topics, opposing positions, fixed formats, and an odd number of judges to decide win and loss.

This type of debates is more frequently called “academic debates” in the literature (You, 2003), partially because the participant teams are mainly universities and colleges. Members of college debate teams usually prepare for debate games during their spare time, hence debates are also viewed as an extra-curricular activity. The worlds’ largest debating tournament—World Universities Debating Championships — is also one of the largest international student events around the world. In American institutions, departments like speech communication or communication studies are established, and they offer degree programs on argumentation and debate. In academic debates, students compete through oral persuasion rather than written argumentation, so they always interact closely with professors in these departments.

Since the formal introduction of academic debates to Chinese higher education settings in 1988, Chinese debates have gained momentum among Chinese higher education institutions. Currently there are three major competitions around Chinese debate domain: World Mandarin Debate Championship, International Chinese Debating Competition and Chinese Debate World Cup. All participants of the competitions above are from prestigious universities both at home and abroad. According to the data collected by The People Daily, in 2017, 388 teams from thirty areas on four continents entered World Mandarin Debate Championship, and this year, the number of participant teams increased to 535. These international and national competitions apart, Chinese debates themselves are popular, prevailing and inclusive “ground-level” extra-curricular activities, attracting intelligent, original and academic-oriented students across universities. Debate clubs and associations abound in every level of the university structure (e.g., college-level, university level).

2.2 The Importance of Presentations to English Instruction

An important feature of the EFL classroom in different parts of the world today is oral presentations. Their significance is manifested in the following two aspects.

Firstly, presentations could be employed as a teaching tool. Pei, Chen (2011) claims that presentations fundamentally embodies three didactics. One is Cooperative Learning: students are requested to cooperate with other group members, share resources and exchange ideas during topic selection and content preparation and final performance. One is Autonomous Learning: students choose the subjects they want, collect, analyze and synthesize information and advance their own perspectives in English, which effectively cultivate their self-study capabilities. The other is Task-based Language Teaching: in order to accomplish tasks, students utilize network to gather relative data and materials, and then express opinions. In presentation, if students would like to get something meaningful, or dig something original from the topics, they should absorb more knowledge to broaden their horizon.This is achieved only if they are using the language meaningfully and purposefully.

Additionally, presentations are demonstrations of learning outcomes or an effective evaluative tool. Presentations integrate the language skills of reading, listening, speaking, writing (Al-issa amp; Al-qubtan, 2010), and even translating, especially for second language learners. While someone is presenting his or her work with a power point, for instance, his or her speech, logical thinking and comprehension could be examined by the instructor. And the audience is reading the slides, listening to the speaker, and noting down key words in preparation for asking some questions on the topic. Students are expected to deliver English presentations in an organized and fluent manner after being educated at universities, which helps prepare for their future life. At work, individuals sometimes need to talk on behalf of their companies. Only with great presentation abilities can students be more competitive in the workplace.

What constitutes good presentations? Two dimensions matter: language quality such as wording; non-verbal skills like interaction skills and impression management skills. In addition, strong confidence and high expectations from within and without build great presenters as well.

2.3 Transfer of Knowledge and Skills Across Languages

In educational psychology, “transfer” specifically means transfer of learning. It is the dependency of human conduct, learning, or performance on prior experience. The concept is initially introduced as “transfer of practice” (Woodworth, Thorndike, 1903). The two psychologists explore how individuals transfer learning under one circumstance to another similar circumstance, or how “improvement in one mental function” would affect a related one. The ability of transfer of learning refers to the ability that individuals apply their existing knowledge to other new situations and solve new problems, or the ability to “learn from the past” when they review what they have acquired.

According to the interplay between different subjects, transfer of learning can be divided into positive transfer, zero transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer, which is most familiar to the public, is the improvement and embellishment of present knowledge through gaining extra information or education. It occurs when something that individuals have already learned aids them in later learning. This positive impact is not only on the time and efficiency of learning, but also on the depth and flexibility, like Chinese proverbs suggest: “ understand the rest by analogy” and “draw inferences about other cases from one instance”. Negative transfer is the interference of the previous knowledge with new learning. It usually manifests itself very often as limitations on learners’ effective mastery of accurate knowledge. It occurs when experience with a set of events hurt the performance on related tasks. Zero transfer occurs when learning one skill has no impact on the performance of another.

In this thesis, transfer of learning particularly refers to the transference of ability and knowledge encapsulated in the native language to that encoded in the second language. Research abounds on this type of transference. Alister Henry Cumming, a Canadian linguist, investigated writing skills transferring from first to second languages in 1980s. Cumming (1990) found three thinking episodes of 23 ESL learners writing in their first and second languages: looking for and evaluating wording; comparing equivalent words in two languages; reasoning about language choices in English. Through multivariate analyses, he believes that subjects’ writing expertise in their mother tongue plays in a decisive role in the frequency of the three thinking episodes. Alexander Schüler-Meyer, Susanne Prediger, Taha Kuzu, Lena Wessel, Angelika Redder (2019) conduct a qualitative research to explore to what degree can students profit from bilingual teaching approaches in mathematics. The experiment on 128 German and Turkish bilingual students in Grade 7 in German schools reveals that the students with academic or technical knowledge in their home languages profit even more from the bilingual teaching.

Other incidences of transference of knowledge and skills across languages include that bilingual children’s word awareness in their mother tongues plays a causal role in their second language reading acquisition ( Yelland, Pollard, amp; Mercuri, 1993); the performance of Hispanic bilingual pupils on defining English words is significantly explained by their word knowledge in Spanish (Carlisle, Beeman amp; Spharim, 1999); for Spanish-speaking children who have learned French for 7 months, their second language’s word recognition through the visual route and text comprehension depends on the corresponding ability in first language (Lefrancois amp; Armand, 2003).

Transfer happens when two activities share common components, no matter whether learners are aware of them ( Thorndike, 1903, Woodworth, 1914). Considering the close correlations between demands for debates and presentations, the possibilities of transfer from debating in Chinese and presenting in English are exceedingly high.

Chapter Three Methodology

This chapter explains the methods that have been used in this study. It introduces the research questions, setting, participants, researcher positionality, the procedures of data collection and data analysis for this study.

3.1 Research Questions

1. How do Chinese debate activities impact non-English majors’ English presentation skills? How do Chinese debate activities impact their choices of words? Chinese debate activities impact their non-verbal skills? Chinese debate activities impact their self-consciousness?

2. What can students and educators learn from the impacts? What can they do to improve non- English majors’ presentation skills and English-teaching curriculum?

3.2 Setting

The research was conducted at Southeast University (SEU), a member of both Project 985 and Project 211. SEU ranked among the top 20 research universities in China, and among the top 300 in the world. In 2018, there were 16,453 full-time undergraduates at SEU according to the statistics on the official website. According to Report on Employment Quality of Graduates of Southeast University of year 2016, 2017 and 2018, the students came from 34 provinces in China, with Jiangsu Province being the major source province. Students from Jiangsu Province took up approximately 27% of undergraduate students and students from Anhui Province took up approximately 12%. Due to the developed economy and advanced education systems in eastern coastal areas of China, students from these areas had a better command of English, especially oral English than those in inland provinces.

English is the one compulsory foreign language course on the university curriculum for every undergraduates. Non-English majors have English courses approximately 64 periods in a 30-person class each semester for 3 semesters.

There are 22 school debate teams and one university debate team of SEU, and the latter usually consists of elite members of the former. The school debate teams usually take part in 2 main Chinese debate activities. One is Freshmen Cup in each fall semester. Entry is only open to freshmen. The other is School Cup in each spring semester, which is also called Perfection Cup, for SEU’s motto is Striving for Perfection. All students, from freshmen to seniors, are able to compete for their own schools in this Cup. For the university debate team, besides the 2 cups, the members often take part in other debate competitions outside campus on behalf of SEU. Common ones are World Chinese Debate Championship, Changjiang Delta Debate Competition, Baihe Debate Competition, Nanjing City Debate Competition, Jiangning District Debate Competition, Taxation Debate Competition and so on. The formats of the above competitions are almost the same. All contestants will be given their topics and positions a week before the competitions. The topics are mainly about politics and world affairs, philosophy and ideology. According to the competition format, 2 teams, with 4 members in each team are supposed to debate over a topic for approximate 40 minutes. Also, the games are elimination tournaments. Only the winner is qualified to go to the next round.

3.3 Participants

The participants of the research were drawn from the university debate team, the members of which were also non-English major freshmen and sophomores. The juniors and seniors were not selected because English was not their compulsory subject, so they had few opportunities to deliver English presentations. On average, each participant delivered an English presentation at class for approximately 5 minutes once a semester. Altogether ten non-English-major debaters participated in the research. Three were freshmen and seven were sophomore. Two majored in arts and six majored in science and engineering. Seventy percent of the participants were male and thirty percent were female. The demographic features of all participants were summarized in Table 1 below.

3.4 Researcher Positionality

剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：58034字