How to Improve Middle School Students’ Oral English Through Activities in Class.doc

How to Improve Middle School Students Oral English Through Activities in ClassAbstract：Language is the tool of communication. One of aims of teaching English in middle school is to develop the ability of communicating with English. In practice, some students feel that speaking is difficult and the practical communication is little. Many factors lead to the situation. The main factors are: students psychological factors, teachers traditional teaching methods and lack of practical drills. It introduces some effective teaching techniques: practical drills and setting situation in which we can improve the students speaking ability through some activities. The practical drill approach includes simple practice, group work, dialogues, games, discussions and debates, warm-ups and fillers, listening to tapes. The setting situations includes performance actions and visual aids. So students apply English to communication in the real life and study. Now more and more English teachers are gradually changing their traditional teaching concepts from basic knowledge to cultivating student ability of using the language. In a middle school, generally the activities are developed in a teachers guiding. The teacher use the practical activities which is necessary to cultivate students interest and effective to improve the students ability of using language. So how do we improve the speaking ability of middle school students in class? This is an important problem. The best way is to practice more and more. Key words: speaking, situation, drill, communication 摘 要：语言是一种交际工具。中学英语教学的目的在于发展英语交际。在实践中, 很多学生感到掌握口语有困难, 缺少实际交谈, 导致这种结果的因素很多。但最主要的原因是学生的心理因素, 学生基本操练甚少和教师的教法陈旧。该文介绍了几种通过课堂活动来提高学生口语的教学方法：实际操练法和情景设置法。实际操练法包括简单活动、小组活动、对话、游戏、讨论、课前热身活动和听录音；情景设置法包括活动演练和教具演练。从而在学习和实际中, 运用英语进行交流. 现在很多老师逐渐改变他们传统的教学观念从基础教学向培养学生运用知识能力转化，所以学生在老师的指导下通过一些实际活动不仅能培养他们学习运用口语的兴趣，而且对提高学生的语言运用技能也有成效。怎样在课堂上提高学生的口语能力，是一个重要的问题. 而最好的方法是反复操练。关键词：口语；情景；操练；交际ContentsAbstract iContentsiiiIntroduction11. The Importance of Oral English 12. The Factors of Influencing Students Speaking Ability 22.1 Psychological Factors of Students22.2 Traditional Teaching of Teachers 33. The Methods of Improving Middle School Students Oral English 43.1 The Drills of Practical Activities4 3.2 The Design of Situation for Speaking 10 3.2.1 Performance Actions10 3.2.2 Visual Aids10Conclusion 11Bibliography12Acknowledgements 13Introduction One particular problem in the teaching of speaking that has become important over the last few years is that students who have had several years of training in speaking are still unable to actually use the language especially in developing countries. However, good a student may be at listening and understanding, it doesnt mean that he will speak well. Like listening ability, speaking ability should partly be the natural result of using English as the main means of communication in the classroom. The teachers should use some useful ways to improve the ability in speaking through a lot of practice. Its very important to improve the middle school students speaking skills and there has to be training in the productive skills of speech as well. The purpose of learning a foreign language is to communicative in the target language and speaking is the most direct communicative methods. Its very important to make them be interested in speaking. 1. The Importance of Oral English As we know, Language is the most important communication tool of human beings. With the development of economy in our country, each field is opening to the outside world widely with quick speed. Now its really hard to imagine what will happen if we dont grasp the speaking skills of the English language. In the past, speaking was not thought to be as important as the other language skills in teaching. In fact, from a long-term point of view, speaking is more useful than listening, reading and writing in communication. Among the four basic language skills, developing students listening and speaking abilities should be given the priority. That is particularly important and necessary in middle school. Speaking is not only one way of providing variety in teaching procedures, it also help students to remember what they have learned, and to understand what to say in different situation. If you give more chances to every student to speak, they will be full of confidence. They will be more and more interested in English. Then the other skills of language will be improved correspondingly. 2. The Factors of Influencing Students Speaking Ability Some characteristics must be taken into account in the productive generation of speech but with a slight twist, in that the learner is now the producer. Bear in mind that characteristics of spoken language can make oral performance easy as well as, in some case, difficult. 2 2.1 Psychological Factors of Students As we know, its very important that students psychical mind when they speak in class. There are include recognizes and confidences. Recognize Class training often involves question and answer practice, in which it will make it easier for students to recognize the turn. However, in real communication, students may have difficulty conducting a conversation, not knowing when to speak or when to give up their turn to others. Recognizable pronunciation is necessary for speech to be intelligible. It is some hard to understand people with a strong regional accent in our own language, and it is hard to interpret a non-native speakers “Easeeattrejet?” as “is it three yet?”4 Confidence Many students seem to put little confidence in speaking English in the classroom. They often worry about making mistakes in their English and feel that it might be better not to speak English at all. Many people do not like speaking in front of large group of people. This is especially true in a foreign language, because we may worry about producing utterances with many errors or oddities in them. 4 Many linguists point out; Any spoken language must be used in communication. It has been proved that the teaching of grammar and vocabulary through dialogue and exercises, though useful, does not seem to be enough and soon becomes boring. That is to say, teachers need to be more active to motivate their students and be trained to use the language to say or do meaningful things. Thus, how to develop speaking competence has become a leading problem to teachers. 2.2 Traditional Teaching of Teachers Many students say that they want more conversation in speaking classes, but several problems arise. For one thing, students often do not know what to talk about. They are at a loss as to how a native speaker begins a conversation. The traditional method usually emphasizes the teaching of the second language grammar, and its principal/ practical technique is to translate from and into the target language. More often the language is presented in short grammatical chapters or lessons, each containing a few grammar points or rules, which are set out and illustrated by examples. The grammatical features that are focused upon in the course-book and by the teacher in his or her lesson are not disguised or hidden. A technical grammatical terminology is not avoided. 3. The Methods of Improving Middle School Students Oral English Here Id like to outline and make a comment on some effective methods of improving the speaking skills of middle school students which are being adopted in the teaching process. In teaching, various activities are implemented for this purpose. More technique and practices are required. 3.1 The Drills of Practice Activities There are some process of practice to improve middle school students speaking. It include simple practice, dialogue, game discussion and debates, warm-ups and fillers and make use of tapes. 3.1.1 Simple Practice Simple practice consist of several teaching techniques and they prove to be very effective in learning English. First of all, a passage or a dialogue or even students with every few words are read for them; the whole class is asked to listen and repeat together. By this way, every one is encouraged to open their mouth with increasing confidence. 3.1.2 Group work Group activity should face the whole class as well as the individuals. In the group activity, some students are very active, and the their speaking ability will develop quickly. They will naturally play an active part in organizing and leading the group activity. However, some students get into the habit of just listening, and seldom express their own ideas. Gradually, they will become indifferent to all the language activities. What is worse, they will even become unsociable and eccentric in disposition. Given a careful analysis, these students can be divided into two categories: One kind is the students slow in learning because of their poor foundation in English. They want to take part in the activity, but are not able to. To hide the inferiority, they just stay out of it, and eventually become bored of the study. The other kind is the ones who are introvert. They are capable of speaking, but they are not good at finding the opportunity; they like thinking things over by themselves. Some of them are even the top students in class. To these two kinds of students the teacher should encourage them to join in the activity and design proper topic to their level, letting them feel the happiness of success. We can divide the class into halves A and B. First, A listen and repeat, then B try. When we practice asking and answering, we let A ask, B answer, then change role. The third way of practice is to speak in rows, teams or groups. We can clearly know how they are speaking because fewer students are involved. The four is; Ask individual students to stand up and speak. He/She will not feel nervous at all since he/she has been so familiar with the types, and has done so much before. Wave practice can be called the fifth way. That is to say, first ask one team to say a sentence, then ask two team to repeat the same sentence, then three teams follow, four teams do it again, etc. It is so easy and interesting that more students will be likely to join in it. 3.1.3 Dialogues One of the most useful technique for the presentation and practice of phonological, lexical and grammatical items is dialogue. As communication approaches have developed, teachers have been concerned to ensure that students not only practice speaking in a controlled way in order to produce features off pronunciation, vocabulary, and structure accurately, but also practice using these features more freely in purposeful communication. For example, there are skills relating to opening and closing conversations, to the sharing of time, to taking turns and contributing both shorter and longer turns as appropriate, to attending to and responding to ones interlocutor, and to interrupting. Such as intelligible pronunciation and grammatical and lexical accuracy, notice. Must be capable of making lengthy and complex contributions as appropriate. There are clearly implications here for the kind of practice that teachers can provide which will help students to develop these skills. It will need to move well beyond the controlled dialogue with short turns that are traditional associated with textbooks5. It is very easy to develop the mini-dialogue into pair work. The teacher, after some choral, group and individual repetition to teach the students the probably every unfamiliar sound, can proceed round the class, asking a different students each time. Then he can have two of the better and more active students come to the front of the class and say the dialogue, each one taking a part3. As cunnings worth points out, reading or memorizing a printed dialogue does not allow student to develop the ability to produce the quick real-time responses which are an essential feature of fluency in a conversation context2. Of course, it is useful for students to memorize some common stock phrases that they can then use, but a dialogue is always between at least two people, so we can never predict what the other person will say next. So that can teachers do to make dialogue more communicative? First of all, turn the dialogue into role plays, so the students can pretend they are acting as someone else. Some students become less inhibited about speaking in front of class when they are acting6.3.1.4 Games The aim of learning English is communication. Playing games is an effective way of it. All kinds of games can make class funny and interesting. All the students are in full swing when enjoying playing game in class. Meanwhile, they are so willing to practice the language points you want them to grasp. In my opinion, the following games are exceptionally helpful. The Guess Game There be is an important pattern in English, but there isnt such a corresponding one in Chinese. We can easily learn it well by the game-playing. For example, A box with some objects in it put before the class. One student is asked to come to the teachers desk and take out some from the box, then ask the other students to take a guess of whats in the box by asking: Is therein the box? Whats in the box? The students will feel familiar with the pattern after guessing time after time and use it quickly. This guess game is very useful. Letter, professions, age, objects, places, items, almost everything can be come the contents of guess. The Competition Game The “conversation”game: Divide the class into several groups. Each group must have a representative figure to answer the teachers questions. Their answers must be different. 3.1.5 Discussion and debates There is a pervasive phenomenon existing in students. It seems everything theyve just learnt is forgotten soon after they leave the class and they can hardly speak English outside the class. Discussion is a profitable way for sure. Such a discussion can arouse the interest which surely leads to success. Organize an informal discussion or a formal debate on a topic of interest to the learners. Get them to propose or select the topic. It is often best to decide on the topic the lesson before the actual discussion or debate4.3.1.6 Warm-ups and fillers There are many other very simple but effective speaking activities, especially for intermediate or small group. Some are particularly good as warm-ups at the beginning of lessons, or fillers at the end. For example, what a great holiday that was!, and then sit down and wait for questions. If nobody ask a question, you can write cause on the board, for example, “when?”, “where ?”, “who with?”, “How long ?”. After you have answered a good number of questions, put the learners into groups and invite one person in each group to say “what a great holiday that was!” Other topics can be handled in the same way, for example, “What a terrible night that was!” “What an interesting person she is!”4 3.1.7 Tapes Although students have an hours class to practice their listening and oral English a week, its quite insufficient to meet the needs. Practice makes perfect. The most effective way we stress is listening to the tape at least an hour everyday. Many students have got cassette players and tapes. Teachers should recommend them some suitable tapes to listen to. The content and difficulty of the tapes should be suitable to hold their interests and help them concentrate on listening. When students are listening, ask them to repeat or imitate to practice their oral English at the same time. At the beginning, it is necessary to check their listening homework. This proves to be effective. Meanwhile, the students should be accustomed to strange foreign phonetics as quickly as possible and deepen their understanding of English as a lively communicative medium progressively. The teacher should have the students listen to audio tapes of native speakers talking with necessary explanations and analysis. Promote students awareness of cultural differences. The teacher can do this by way of playing the tapes several times and then explaining language points in natural and vivid words with full use of object teaching, gestures, sketches, facial expressions and demonstrations so as to enable the students to communicate in real life situation. 3.2 The design of situation for speaking Another way to practice oral proficiency is to set up situation. Design of situation for speaking is useful to improve the students speaking, there are two methods for it. 3.2.1 Performance Actions Performing actions is an active, vivid and effective way of teaching English. Take “Take present continuous Tense” for example, we can ask a student to come to the front of perform the action: open the door, close the window, clean the blackboard, etc. Then the teacher asks the question: “What is he doing?” The students answer: He is opening the doorclosing the windowcleaning the blackboard. etc. Together with the grammatical rules, the students will find it easy to understand and the tense is easier than they imagine it might be. 3.2.2 Visual Aids The other way of improving speaking ability that is to use some objects. Such as visual stiomuli-maps, cartoons, pictures and so on. It is important that he known what he wants from a photograph