毕业论文课题相关文献综述

Nowadays improving students` oral communication skills has been the primary task in Chinas college English teaching. In this study the oral accuracy among EFL learners at different working memory levels and planning conditions will be analyzed. And in this chapter, literature is reviewed in two major parts with four sub-sections in each, first on the theoretical foundation based on which this research is conducted, second on empirical studies, both involving three variants in the present study, i.e., oral production (or oral accuracy), working memory, and planning. In addition, before the end of this chapter, the author conducted a brief discussion about the limitations in previous studies.

2.1 Theoretical issues

2.1.1 Levelts Model of Oral Production

Basically all studies concerning oral production or the notion of planning draw on the model of speech production proposed by Levelt (1989) as a reference. According to this model, the translation of speakers thoughts and intentions (or the production of spoken language) involves three major stages of processing:

l Conceptualization: in which the link between the desired concepts that are to be verbally expressed and the particular words are built and thus the preverbal intended messages are created;

l Formulation: in which the linguistic forms based on the preverbal messages are created and transformed into the expression of intended messages. This stage involves three sub-sections: grammatical encoding, morpho-phonological encoding, and phonetic encoding;

l Articulation: in which the actual speech is formulated through the involvement of different parts of vocal apparatus.

In addition to these three stages, there is another stage known as self-monitoring, through which the speakers test whether the overt speech is in accordance with the desired message and thus have a self-assessment of their utterance production.

According to the speech production model, planning could take place either prior to task performance or while performing a task (Ellis, 2005). This model and the related studies conducted by Levelt have shed light on both other studies concerning oral production and the present study. Though the speech production has been initially proposed to explain the oral production of native speakers, it has later on served as an explanation and reference of L2 oral production. Given that the oral production of native speakers (or L1 speakers) is automatic while that of L2 speakers is not, this model is more an explanation to L2 speech production from the perspective of psycholinguistic.

2.1.2 Working Memory