Strategies To Improve The Second Language Speaking Skills

WRIT 26
Mar 20 2017
WHAT ARE THE STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE THE SECOND LANGUAGE SPEAKING SKILLS?
Sam ZheyiZheng
What are the strategies to improve the second language speaking skills?
Reaching the proficient level in the second language speaking ability continues to be a universal goal for all students. The objective of this paper tends to examine strategies that can apply to improve the second language speaking skills in the non-English speaking community. The result of learning a second language speaking skills is very important for students to achieve their goals.
Literature Review
Interview
Participant
The participant of my interview named Jason Jinxiao Song, a student at UCSC. He differs from other local American student that he was born in China, so Chinese is his first language, and English is his second language. He started to learn English in China on Age 8, and he immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 12. Now, he is also a freshman like me, and he can speak English as fluent as Chinese.
Procedure
At the beginning, I prepared 15 questions for the interview and all followed teacher’s instructions. The interview was taken in College Ten Study Room, and I used a recording pen for the record our conversation. We talked about 2 hours, then Jason sent text messages to me for more of his background information.
Data Summary
Jason was born in Changchun, a northern city of China, and his first language is Chinese. He has Dongbei Chinese dialect as me, which illustrates that Jason’s Chinese is the same as the local.
He started to learn English in his primary school, because almost all young people in China are required to learn English, and need to have English standard test for applying middle school, high school, and university. From our interview, Jason said the education of English in China’s primary school was not good because they only focused on grammar instead of speaking. However, given that he knew he would immigrate to the United States, he did not just learn English in primary school, and his mum hired some foreigners, whose first language is English as his tutor in the home.
From our interview, Jason thought his tutors are very useful for his speaking learning. Although these tutors can speak a little Chinese because they were an international student in China, they never speak Chinese with Jason, and Jason could only speak English with them. Jason has a 2-hour tutoring everyday, and tutors gave Jason some essay homework, which was all in English everyday. His tutor would not blame him even his speaking has lots of mistakes, and the pronunciation sounded local that time and this made Jason was not scared to speak to others. Also, talking with tutors made Jason had an ideology to American culture, which differs from Chinese culture. Jason said although he only had 2 hours of speaking English that period, it was useful enough for an only eight years old boy.
At that time, Jason knew he is different from his classmates in total. The first reason is that the immigration plan of his family and the second reason is that he believed that the education system of the United Stated is more suitable for him than Chinese education system. When he was 11 year...