Abstract
In this study the author tries to assess the effects of Theme-based Oral Approach (TOA) on the oral English proficiency of non-English majors as well as students’ leaning motives and interests resulted from the approach in EFL class of China. The study follows the quantitative and qualitative method in light of questionnaire, interview, class observation with the causal-comparative study between treatment group and control group. The result shows that a majority of students with TOA improved their oral English learning more than those with Traditional Teaching Method (TTM). It also finds that TOA is able to motivate the students to speak in class and a certain percentage of students can overcome their psychological problems in expressing ideas. The findings are that TOA affects students’ achievement in a favorable way which provides some theoretical, methodological and practical implications.
Highlights
Oral English is often underdeveloped for English non-majors in their university study in China
On the basis of analyzing the requirements for college English teaching, the paper intends to argue the importance of taking these factors into consideration and tries to resolve it in terms of Theme-based Oral Approach (TOA)
The scores for both tests are found to be normally distributed with bell-shaped curve. It can be seen from the table 3 that mean of the pre-test for treatment group (136) and control group (150) are respectively 64.93 and 65.23, which implies that the two groups are in similar oral English proficiency
Summary
Oral English is often underdeveloped for English non-majors in their university study in China. A combination of potent inhibitors is responsible for this situation: large class size, inappropriate teaching method and time constraints. A succession of new perspective as to oral English proficiency through readers’ theatre (Leong, 2002), group work (Bassano, 2003), and drama (Miccoli, 2003) have been presented. These studies indicate that language researchers have come to attach greater importance to oral English by means of various measures in language teaching than before
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