English Oral English Research and Testing

Author: Wen Qiufang, Wang Lifei (editors)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-03-01
Features: "Speaking" is one of the core skills of English expression. For a long time, the study of language production has been a central topic for psycholinguists, applied linguists, and language acquisition experts. However, collecting and transcribing spoken language corpora is cumbersome and complex, making spoken language research more challenging compared to other language skills such as listening, reading, and writing. In the 1980s, conversational analysis (CA) emerged in foreign countries, with its main focus on the conversational structures and characteristics of native speakers, while research on the spoken discourse of second language learners remained relatively weak. The situation in China is similar. On one hand, research on Chinese spoken language has been very active, yielding numerous achievements, while research on foreign language spoken language has been quite sparse. Before the mid-1990s, there were very few research outcomes on foreign language spoken language in China, especially empirical discourse analysis based on data was rare. Since 1995, a group of scholars in China have focused on the spoken interlanguage of Chinese learners, combining China's foreign language teaching practices. Through nearly a decade of relentless effort, some significant achievements have been made. We are pleased to see that theoretical models reflecting the characteristics and patterns of Chinese learners' foreign language spoken development are gradually forming, an objective assessment system for evaluating Chinese students' English speaking ability has been established and is continuously improving, and teaching methods tailored to China's foreign language spoken language teaching practices are constantly emerging. These achievements represent major breakthroughs in both theory and practice, and some of them have already been directly applied to foreign language teaching, effectively promoting the reform of China's higher foreign language education in the new century.