However, the situation of middle school oral English teaching and learning is far from optimistic. Many students who can get good marks in examinations are unable to use English to communicate clearly and fluently because of examination-oriented education, lack of an English speaking environment and traditional teaching methods and so on. Therefore, doing some research on oral English teaching is very necessary. In the following context, the author will analyze the problems and try to put forward some solutions to oral English teaching. She hopes that her research can contribute to the improvement of middle school students’ oral English.

2. Literature Review

Under Chinese present situation, more and more graduates with higher proficiency are required. However, a lot of middle school students are unable to communicate fluently due to their poor oral English. Thus, it is an urgent task for middle school teachers to help students improve their oral English to the required level. In this part, the author will review the literature of oral English teaching, so as to lead more English teachers to put forward new and effective ways of oral English teaching.

Listening-based method  源'自:751`!论~文'网www.751com.cn

For a long time, listening has always been considered as a process of decoding speech. Logically, second language learners can not learn a language if they never hear it. It is regarded as code breaking process. Language learns work out the language code from the message by listening.

James Asher’s total physical response method (TPR) was one of the first to view listening as code breaking. It claimed that listening to commands and carrying them out was an effective way of learning a second language. TPR stresses learning by means of physical actions.

Communicative methods 

The communicative methods are the methods that have stressed the learner’s dual roles as both listeners and speakers. They believe that it is helpful to listen to authentic language consisting of judiciously chosen samples of unexpurgated native speech. Authentic speech evidently needs to be made comprehensible by one method or anther if it is to be useful to the learner. (Cook, 2000: 67)

According to listening-based teaching method TPR stresses learning by means of physical actions. English teachers have tried to use listening in oral English class. However, students just listen and imitate the speakers mechanically with little alteration of the context. Because of students’ unauthentic oral English, their speaking English can not lead to satisfactory outcome or even brings about communication failure even though they can interact with each other. Thus, the present listening-based methods can hardly meet the need of intermediate level. (Jeremy 35)

Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis