The Influence of Background Music Teaching on Accuracy and Fluency of Freshmen ’s Oral English in China

Abstract

Many students like listening to music through mobile phones or computers when they are studying after class. Some students stated they were more efficiency when they were studying with the background music;some claimed they were distracted by the background music.In English teaching, students tend to have anxiety due to various subjective and objective reasons. If students are too anxious, it will affect their oral performance, especially accuracy and fluency. Therefore, to help students improve their oral English, we need to help them overcome their anxiety. In oral English teaching, an effective way to relieve students’ anxiety is to play background music. Because the musical background helps to create a relaxed atmosphere in which anxiety and tension are relieved and attention to the new content is aroused. The paper studied the influence of background music teaching on accuracy and fluency of freshmen’ s oral English. The results were in the following: 1). Background music teaching did not facilitate clear effect on oral accuracy of college students. To be specific, background music teaching only could help to reduce the rate of students’ pronunciation error. In terms of syntactic errors and self-repair, the traditional teaching has decreased more than background music teaching. Background music teaching did not help to reduce lexical errors. 2). Compared with traditional teaching, oral fluency in background music teaching has not improved significantly. 3). This research results challenged the traditional idea that background music could achieve better teaching effect. Although background music might reduce the pressure and relieve the atmosphere, it could not help students to acquire more comprehensive input. Students need more quiet teaching environment and relevant module training, especially the flexible use of vocabulary, are needed to improve the accuracy and fluency of students’ oral English to a greater extent.