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f cultivating themselves in all aspects. 3.2 The importance of oral English 3.2.1 The characteristics of spoken language “Speaking is the skill that the students will be judged upon most in real- life situation. It is an important part of everyday interactions and most often the first impression of a person is based on his/her ability to speak fluently and comprehensibly. So, as teachers, we have a responsibility to prepare the students as much as possible to be able to speak in English in the real world outside the classroom and the testing room.” [13] “Like writing, speaking is a productive skill. When students speak, they produce new sentences, not merely repeat what they have heard or read.”[14] But it is different from writing in some aspect, it is more direct: students usually speak face to face, so they can get the information they need very quickly and speak anything they think at that moment. “Through speaking, it is very easy for students to realize they are practicing what they have learned and realize they are making progress. The more language they produce, the more achievement they make.”[15] “One of the characteristics of speech in everyday life is that speech is spontaneous. That is, in most situations, people do not plan ahead of time what they are going to say. Only in more formal situations, such as when a person has been asked to give a speech.” [16] Because speech is spontaneous, there will be many false start, repetitions, broken sentences and so on, so it is hard for the students to produce sentences in the language classroom. For this, Bygate points out that the teacher should require their students to do more forward thinking and planning than native speakers do in real life! [17] In middle school, most students are incompetent in spoken English without any preparation, so the teacher had better give some instructions before they join the real communicative activities. “Time pressure is not the only issue that is difficult for language students; they must also consider whom they are talking to and be able to check if they are being understood. If they are not they need to be able to change strategies. One advantage in learning to speak compared to learning to write is that the speaker gets immediate feedback from the listener, so the speaker can adjust the message immediately.”[18] 3.2.2 The role of spoken language in communicative classroom In a communicative classroom, the main purpose is to enable the students to perform activities and learning tasks in the target language. The goal of language teaching and learning is emphasized on the communicative nature of language. In short, the essence of language learning is for communication and self—expression. The communicative approach to language teaching has a strong emphasis on speaking. Speaking is playing a very important part in communicative classroom. 3.2.3 The current problems Speaking is a very important part of learning foreign languages, and it is a skill, just like high jumping, driving a car, or playing ping—pong. “In comparison, Chinese is quite different from English in many ways, e.g., the inflexion of words, word order in a sentence, etc. So students try to struggle with the differences when they try to use the language.” [19] For English learners, especially middle school students, speaking is often a very difficult skill because most of them have only a small vocabulary of English words and they can’t express themselves correctl