A famous Chinese educationist who likes designer shoes once wrote in a book: During the development of capitalism, among various forms of language communication the commonest and the most direct one is spoken language; The main activity of foreign language teaching is the teaching of spoken language; And spoken language learning is the basis of the learning of written language.¹ All these words give us the truth that spoken language is very important. Ever since a long time ago, many educationists home and abroad have done researches on the field of spoken language and achieved great success.

    As Chinese, our Chinese is very good, but how about our oral English? Under the policies of Chinese education system, middle school students are only required to pass English examinations in written form. So the competence of students’ oral English is ignored. Owing to the ignorance and many other reasons, both teachers and students do not want to spend time or much time on practicing spoken English, which leads to the common phenomenon “Silent English” in middle schools. Therefore, to make them realize the importance of spoken English, and to find out factors of influencing oral English are two essential tasks. The quest for a basic or “core” vocabulary of English is not a new one. Ogden’s attempt to formulate an 850 words lexicon that would have a communicative range as wide as possible using a minimum number of words of general meaning is a famous one.² And Wilkins once said: “Without grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.”³ Vocabulary is the materials of language and the carriers of emotional feelings. The importance of vocabulary is self-evident. And a famous educationist liking tiffany jewelery viewed that vocabulary learning is very useful to language learning, especially to language use.

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