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Due to different reasons, the external elements such as curriculum design and the quality of teachers and the internal elements such as English foundation, personal efforts and learning methods, the bad situation of the spoken English proficiency of English majors can be explained. For different English learners, the possible reasons to explain their spoken English proficiency vary from person to person. Some conclusions drawn from the previous researches may apply to the common, but each group has its specific feature.
Thus this paper endeavors to perceive the current situation of oral English learning of English majors at a university of technology from the perspectives of students’ internal factors and the university’s external resources. In this way, the author tries to know the problems these English majors encountered in the process of spoken English learning on the basis of having some understanding of the previous relevant researches. Combining the existing research findings, this paper specifically analyzes the possible reasons and puts forward some methods suitable for these English majors to help improve their oral English proficiency and communicative competence in a practical way.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Definition of Spoken English
Spoken language, as the language used for oral expression when people communicate with each other face to face, is the most frequently used communicative tool in human society. And English, for its character of being easy to learn, is increasingly used and learned as the official language, second language or foreign language in many countries. Thus spoken English is a fundamental skill of English learning and it requires not only students’ ability of listening and speaking, but also their ability to practically apply language in communication (Wang, 2011: 108-110).
Spoken English proficiency is composed of several elements like linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, communicative strategy, affective factors and so on (Zhu, Peng, 2006: 101-102). From the aspect of communication context, spoken English has the characteristics of directness, immediacy and unpredictability (Wen, 1999). Upon most occasions, the two sides of oral communication meet each other face to face, which demand the instant response of each other and raise a higher requirement of the speakers’ basic English skills and expressing ability. To help the two sides in a conversation understand each other better, standard pronunciation and tone are necessary. According to Skehan(1996), the spoken English proficiency of students can be analyzed from three dimensionalities: veracity, fluency and complexity. In this way, the current situation of spoken English learning can be understood and improved.
2.2 Research on Oral Test in China
As our English majors mainly take part in the oral English test in China to evaluate their spoken English proficiency, a review on the development of oral English test in China is carried out to know the change of requirements for students’ spoken English. While foreign language test has a history of more than one hundred years, the history of oral test is comparably limited. It is since the rising of structuralism test system after 1940s that oral test became a part of foreign language proficiency evaluation. Structuralism oral test emphasizes the accuracy of spoken form，such as standard pronunciation and tone and accurate grammar form. As its typical question forms are reading aloud, retelling, completing dialogue, picture-cued conversation, inpidual conversation and answering questions, the commonly applied modes in structuralism oral test are one-way expression and two-way one-round. In this way, the examination questions in structuralism oral test are comparably mechanical and rigid. They are out of the corresponding language context and lack information exchange. In short, the emphasis of structuralism oral test grading is the accuracy of language and the proficiency of skills, which makes the grading of structuralism oral test relatively objective and reliable (Wen, 1999).