ased tests. [3]
Their remark exactly reflects the problems in applying CLT in the Chinese education context too. Besides, in order to approach the problems of CLT in middle school teaching practice, the writer of this paper has made a questionnaire. Fifty senior students of Grade 1 were chosen casually to complete the questionnaire in Putian No.5 Middle school (the questionnaire and the results could be seen clearly in the appendix).
According to Richard and Rodgers’ words and the practical results from the writer’s questionnaire, following is the analysis of some problems in details.
2.1 Students’ low level of oral English proficiency
The first problem which lowers the effect of CLT is learner’s low level of oral English.
We can see from the Question 1 and Q2 in the questionnaire that most of students are interested in English oral communication. But when the teacher ask some questions only quite a few students will coordinate actively. Others are neither autonomous, nor competitive or nor self-confident in class. This is a phenomenon on surface. For the reasons, in current China, in the middle school stage, especially in junior schools, students often grasp quite a few English words and limited structures of sentences. Besides their attentions are put on the word and grammar, which tends them to low oral level. From Q3 in writer’s questionnaire, we can see so many students feel themselves lacking of vocabulary, being not familiar with the structure of sentences. They are afraid to make mistakes in grammar or show poor pronunciation. All of these show that their oral English proficiency is low.
If students do not have a certain oral proficiency in English, it is hard to do some oral communication or some relevant activities. In other words, CLT which needs doing communication between learners can not be carried out when students have low level of oral English proficiency.
2.2 Large class sizes
Most students prefer to speak in English among fewer people rather than facing a lot of people. In Q4 of the questionnaire, 77.08% of the fifty students support this statement. Chinese students were perceived to tend to be more socialized, tend to derive their self-identity from persons around them, and were usually more empathic and perceptive of the feeling and thoughts of others.[4]They are afraid of losing face for they are not adequately encouraged. Influenced by the collectivism, they are not willing to show themselves in public. So a large number of people will give them more pressure to speak in English. But now classes in schools in many parts of China may contain over 50 students and sometimes even more. Large class sizes impedes against improving classroom interaction. The student who is asked to talk in such a large class, finds that so many people are staring at him. Then he will be shamed to open his mouth. This is the subjective difficulty from students in a large-size class.
In the objective aspect, Adam Bennett, an OTP teacher from Britain, complained in his article The Future of OTP in China “many of the students in my school have very poor English skills. …when you are teaching large classes (50-60) students who fall behind (especially like in this case when they are so far behind ) find it relatively impossible to catch up” [5]Teachers find the large class size is the biggest problem that affects the classroom management and learning activities, such as correction of large numbers of essays virtually impossible; It is difficult for
