Using Group Work in Junior Middle School English Speaking小组活动在中学英语口语教学中的应用

小组活动在中学英语口语教学中的运用Using Group Work in Junior Middle School English SpeakingAbstractNumerous scholars have given theoretical knowledge about group work directly or indirectly. But in application of it, there exist problems because in their real teaching, most teachers could not apply this resource properly. The most apparent problems include: organizing the oral group work, classroom controlling and so on. These problems lead to the ineffective class.This thesis aims at developing junior middle school students ability of oral communication in English. It tries to improve students competence of using spoken language. The thesis involves three chapters. Starting with the Preparation Stage in Teaching English Speaking, it explains how to choose the oral topic, design speaking activities and divide groups. In the second chapter, it dicusses how to implement group work in the process of oral teaching. The last chapter expresses the feedback and how to implement the feedback. In order to examine these research questions more effectively, an objective observation and systematic method have been adopted for the authors research. Anyway, this paper indicates that activity-based group oral English teaching takes the development of students, learner-centered teaching and ability enchancing as its main goals. This research does provide students with better language learning, communincating atmospere and chances to practise English spoken language. Therefore this research will surely improve oral language teaching and learning, which may contribute much to the success of enchancing junior middle school students oral communicative ability.Key words: Oral English Group Work Junior Middle School摘要很多专家直接或间接地给出了小组活动的理论依据，但是在实践中依然存在一些问题。如：如何组织口语小组活动，小组活动的课堂监督管理等等。这些问题将直接导致小组活动是否能有效进行。 本文以切实提高初中生英语口语交际能力为目标，旨在帮助学生提高口语综合运用能力。本文共分三个章节。文章开篇指出在英语口语教学中的准备阶段应注意的问题，如如何选口语话题，设计口语活动和分组。在第二章，笔者主要讨论了在口语教学阶段的问题。在最后一章，笔者提出了教学反馈以及如何进行。为了使这个研究更加有效，本研究采用了客观观察法和系统研究法。总之，文中指出小组活动英语口语教学，完全“以学生发展为本，以学习者本身为中心”。通过教师设计的各项小组活动，为学生提供语言学习交流的氛围，增加语言实践机会，使学生在交流合作，同伴互助过程中获得语言运用的能力，从而切实提高口语教学的有效性和可持续性。关键词：英语口语 小组活动 初中iiContentsAcknowledgements.iAbstract.iiAbstract(Chinese).Introduction.1Chapter One Preparation Stage in Teaching English Speaking.31.1 Oral Topic Selection.41.2 Desigining Speaking Activities.51.3 Group Division.7Chapter Two Implementation Stage in Teaching English Speaking.82.1 Creating Scenes and Presenting the Oral Teaching Conntent.82.1.1 Creating Scenes.9 2.1.2 Presenting the Oral Teaching Content.92.2 Developing Group Work. 10Chapter Three Post-Stage in Teaching English Speaking.113.1 TeachersFeedback to Students Oral Performance.11 3.1.1 Teachers Assessment .113.1.2 Teachers Feedback.12 3.2 Homework.12Conclusion.13Notes.15Bibliography.1616IntroductionThere is nothing new that communicative ability is the goal of the learning any foreign languages. Oral English teaching aims to develop studentsability of using English so that they will be able to exchange information effectively through spoken channel in their future work and social interaction, and at the same time they will be able to enhance their ability to study both independetly and collaboratively and improve their cultural awwareness so as to meet the needs of Chinas social development and international exchanges. But in China, most junior middle schools are conducted in a traditional way, which means either by the grammar-translation method or by limited interation between the teacher and students. However, this kind of teaching method leads students to have less opportunities in the oral English. But the group work can make up for this shortcoming.Group work is a way of organizing the class that involves small groups of learners working together. According to Brown:“Group work is a generic term covering a multiplicity of techniques in which two or more students are assigned a task which involves collaboration and self-initiated language.” (2001:173)Group work in collaborative teaching is a type of student-centered activity in which students can communicate and cooperate with peers. It can help to lessen the anxiety of the learners in communication to improve their reaction, as a result, their language using ability and their autonomous learning ability will be improved. Many educators and researchers argue that taking charge of ones learning, that is to say, becoming an autonomous learner can prove beneficial to learning. During interactive activities learners are more autonomous than in teacher-fronted class. Its up to them decide how to complete the task; what strategies will be used; who will play a certain role in group work.Cook (2001) shows that students have different personalities. Some are shy, usually in few words but some are extroverts who like talking to others, expressing their ideas and performing. There would seem an obvious connection to language teaching methods. Zhang Jianzhong once pointed out in Foreign language Pedagogy that in the classroom instruction teachers and students contact is varied, but contact is especially important between students and groups. This is because the identical classs and grades students have the common age feature, state-of-art, learning experience and the emotional factors. Students are easy to transmit and accept the information, and easy to be driven with the sense of participation. They will realize the classroom human relations, which increases the student to have a good command of the foreign language. Just as Long says: “Group work in ESL classrooms is a widespread practice to promote English learning. The use of group work in junior middle school is regard as beneficial to the language acquisition process by creating a non-threatening learning environment and offering students many opportunities to practice various kinds of speech acts.”Hymes(1971) gives the conception of communicative competence. He thinks that only if you know how to appropriately use language, you are the person who acknowledges the language. If language teachers apply these opinions to the class teaching, group work can create more opportunities to use oral English.Wang Qiang (2000) gives us the communicative background of group work, even though she does not elaborate it directly. She states that the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to enable students to use it in work or life when necessary. CLT requires a higher level of communicative competence on the part of the teacher. It also requires that the teacher develops a wider range of skills beyond the presentation and explanation of grammatical structures (Hedge.2000). In a communicative classroom, a great deal of time is spent on managing learning, setting up activities, organizing resources, guiding students in pair or group work, so the adoption of communicative language teaching (CLT) is one possible solution to be the media of the gap between classroom language teaching and real life language use. The goal of communicative language teaching is to develop the students communicative competence. In group work, students have the chance to communicate with others. Harmer (2003) classifies the styles of groups into 5 kinds. Group work is one kind of them. He claims that there are many activities in group work. For example, and students can prepare a presentation then perform it in front of the whole class or discuss an issue and then come to a group decision. He also lists two sides of group work as well as the solving methods.Lu Changquan (2005) asserts that group work is one form of cooperative learning. It has a wide application in English classroom. What each teacher now is concerning about is how to carry out the group work and how to apply group work in English class. From the point of authors view, the teacher makes good use of group work in English teaching and hence the students communicative competence will be well developed. Fan Gexin in Strages and Methods in English Teaching holds that in oral English teaching, we divide the class into small groups to learn collectively as a unit and identify each group leader and recorder together. They complete pre-class oral practice that the teacher has arranged and make a record. The last team - units in the spoken language class use different ways to show their results in order to make each of the students takes part in oral activities, have the opportunity to open their mouths to improve their language skills.The paper aims to improve the efficiency in oral English class and students communicative competence, so the author selects the following relationships and factors as some potential research focuses for me to concentrate on in my further study of the issues identified so far: the authou would like to explore how to use group work in middle school English speaking from three stages: Chapter One: Preparation Stage in Teaching English Speaking. In this chapter, the author would like to make some preparations to diminish their anxiety and encourage them to speak English bravely; Following these principles, various extracurricular and in-class English speaking activities are suggested in Chapter Two Implementation Stage in Teaching English Speaking. Through insistent implementation of the learning strategies in this thesis, both students English speaking ability and teachers teaching efficiency would be improved a lot. At last, in Chapter Three, Post-stage in Teaching English Speaking, the author introduces how to make feedback to students performance and homework in order to test and even improve students oral English.Chapter One Preparation Stage in Teaching English SpeakingIn this chapter, the author would express how to select the topic, how to design speaking activities and how to divide groups, making students feel interesting, open their mouths to speak English and communicate with each other.1.1 Oral Topic SelectionThe spoken language classs contents stem from English curriculum teaching materials. According to each weeks teaching progress, teachers make some researches about the orginal teaching material carefully, and manifest the spoken language characteristic fully. After five to six class instructions, the student has been familiar with the topic that they have learned and some difficult new words which were also solved in the earlier English class. Therefore, it is a good chance for students to have a spoken English class so that they can talk about the familiar topic. Through reorganizing and enchancing the topic, we choose the appropriate materials to give the student, which can make them feel not embarrassed to communicate with each other naturally in English. In communicative process, they can improve communicative competence. The way in which we select oral language topic is good consolidation and enchancement for students to practise English speaking. Take Oxford 6B as an example: the first units topic is the fire. Through studying the concept, the students already have the preliminary understanding to the new words. In the spoken English classroom, through the strategy implementation, teachers let the student discuss how to use the fire, complete the commentary in the group and organize the group series activities and so on. Through the spoken language classroom instruction, the student can be skilled with expressing the related topic in English and applying English into spoken communicative practice, only to achieve the proper teaching goal. In order to express better how to select oral English topic, the author gives two examples.Teachers choose the topic which has the long history and the cultural connotation. Take Unit 8, Book One as an example. In this unit, it says the speaking-English countries. However, students are unfamiliar with these countries, especially Australia. So the teachers should say more things about these countries, such as: countries flags, famous animals, places of interests, presidents and famous people. The teachers also let students look for things about these countries in the internet, books and so on. They can discuss with their classmates about them. At this case, they get more knowledge of communication and are interested in them. The interest is the best teacher. Teachers choose this topic which they have learned before to arouse their interest to communicate with each other in English. The topic that students are interested in. In the studying English process, the learner has the very big individual difference, such as student family difference, former knowledge difference, academic motivation difference, intelligence difference, study style difference and male and female sex difference and so on. These differences are very complex. As a teacher, we should understand that students individual difference needs the different contents differently according to the object, which is the effective and important teaching condition. USs pedagogy and psychologist Howard Gardner proposes the multi-dimensional intelligent theory and proposes the education philosophy according to his own theory “take personally as central education”. This theory is helpful for us to make students correctly observe the teaching view to implement teaching students in accordance with their aptitude. This aspects topic may demonstrate well the individual language style of the learners and the usability of the spoken language teaching. On one hand, the topic has the very strong feasibility, and even the uncertainty topic is also effective carrying on “the recent developing area”. For example, Unit 6, Book One. It teaches the festivals. Students are familiar with these contents. So the teachers do not say more. Beacuse students have the different family background, interests, they have Information Gap among them, they have the word to say and want to say what they do during the festivial. On the account of their interests, they dont have barrier among themselves, so that they speak out freely.1.2 Designing Speaking ActivitiesDesigning speaking activities has the following principles: First, it must be closely linked with the content, and is advantageous to expand course content. Second, it must be hierarchical and proceeds in an orderly way. Third, teachers must take notice of the students different level and their learning goal, which is advantageous in all students participation and in the group cooperation development. Fourth, the activity must have the continuity, and which is good for the teachers and the students to unceasingly deepen the course content. Finally, the form must diversify. Only under the correct instruction, can it help the implementation achieve the validity.Designing speaking activities also has many kinds. According to the special details, the teacher may choose different ways. Below several kinds will be introduced:1.Group lecture. The lecture refers to the audience who sit on the front about some questions expressed; students are asked to talk about their own poinions and expound some affairs. The group lecture may begin in the first several minutes of each spoken English class, represented by the group on some specific content, which has the prepared lecture. In the junior middle school, the spoken language highlights stimulating the students interest, cultivating their study habit, so selecting teaching content is very important. Teachers should select some living, easily understood, related with teaching materials as teaching contents. They give students full of time to prepare, preview and search for relative materials. In each spoken language class, teachers arrange one group to change materials, improve their oral level, and enlarge their knowledge. So oral English content should be arranged before. For example:NumbersTopicsGroups1My birthday partyGroup one2English partyGroup two3Growing upGroup three4Spring FestivalGroup four5Festival in ChinaGroup five6CakeGroup six7I am a little tourist guideGroup seven8FilmGroup eight9ChristmasGroup one10Christmas FatherGroup two11Going shoppingGroup three12ZooGroup four13Future workGroup five14If I live in the pastGroup six15RainGroup seven16Great WallGroup eight17Our MotherlandGroup one18One school dayGroup two2. Group game. The main purpose is to learn through playing. According to studying the content, the group members act relaxing and interesting activity in the good atmosphere of spoken language, strengthening their memory and understanding to the knowledge that they have learned. Language playing form is many and varied, which may carry in certain difficult memory language such as the game “pass a ball”, “look the pictures to say things ”, “sing the songs” and so on.1. 3 Group Division Speaking the group division, we had better use the promiscuous grouping. The goal is not only to enable the students to have the wide range to carry on the cooperation with everyone, but also is to cooperate with persons who the students hope to. We set up a group that can manifest the different roles in the class. Cross-effect groups should consider the following questions: marks, ability, work attitude, disposition, sex and so on. The group members should be controlled among 4 students. If the group is too small, the students dont put their effort on the task; if the group is too big, it is difficult for students to deal with the cooperation. Some students are possibly hidden or neglected so that they have not participated in the activity. At the beginning of the estalishment of study groups, we should make use of constructing the activity to raise the trust among students and consolidate other groups of relations. Each group selects one as a group leader who has an English proficiency and strong organization faculty. The group leader may be seen on behalf of the student, and may also assist the teacher to work. They are the bridge and the coordinator among the students and between the students and teacher. The group leader may be assigned by the teacher, or shehe may also be elected by the students.There are other group division methods. According to the special details, the teacher may choose different ways. Below several kinds commonly used will be introduced: Grouping immediately. Teachers let students and schoolmates who sit near to each other form the same group. Or students choose their partners. Group according to the active task. The teacher sets several different tasks. Students like to cooperate with the ones who like each other. Group according to the same task. They who choose the same task form one group. For example: study this topic:seek employment in the interview. According to the