In order to follow the pace of globalization in the past few decades, Chinese people have been regarding English as an extraordinarily important subject to learn, especially for middle school and university students. As is known to all, during the middle school period(both junior and senior), students’ learning habits tend to mature and which obviously include the habits of students’ oral English. But the reality is that, in most Chinese middle schools, both teachers and students focus more on dealing with the issue of how to get better grades in exams instead of practicing oral English which seems to be of no use. Such phenomenon directly leads to the result that most of Chinese middle school students afraid to speak English in public or use English to talk with others. In oral English teaching in middle schools, problems such as “whether to teach, what to teach and how to teach” have been existing for quite a long time, which reflect the predicament and perplexity in middle school oral English teaching.

The core of middle school(also of any other level) oral English teaching is to let students speak out. To fulfill this goal, creating an atmosphere for them is of vital importance and at this moment, the effect of proper topic-choosing appears. Xiaoqing Qian’s paper A Study on the Teaching Methods of Improving Students' Oral English(2012) has revealed the phenomenon that in the traditional teaching class in China, the teacher likes to ask students questions and the students should hand up to answer but some Chinese students are not active in class. To motivate students to learn oral English and make them want to speak out, good topic-choosing in oral English teaching is indispensable and is one of the few effective ways to drive students’ desire of speaking English.

However, few scholars in global academic circles are concerned about the issue of topic-choosing of oral English teaching especially in middle schools. In Chinese academia, discussion and arguments on oral English teaching has been lasting for long, but most of them focus on general issues such as teaching methods and contents, also only a few scholars have concerned about specific aspects like topic-choosing. Actually, many middle school teachers in China lack the conscious of topic-choosing in oral English teaching as they only care about the content of textbooks. This paper mainly based on the current status of oral English teaching in Chinese middle schools and explains the significance of proper topic-choosing in middle school oral English teaching, as well as giving examples of good topic-choosing. At present, oral English teaching in Chinese middle schools need some new and creative topic-choosing methods.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

This paper focuses on the issue of topic-choosing of oral English teaching in Chinese middle schools at present. Four parts are arranged in this paper. In the first part, this paper will introduce the current situation of Oral English teaching in Chinese middle schools to figure out the core issues like why students are not willing to speak. The next three parts will introduce the significance of these strategies in details. In the second part, this paper will analyze the topic-choosing issue of oral English teaching in Chinese middle schools based on my own experience(with the help of my former English teachers) as well as the result of the questionnaire, which will be illustrated with examples. In the third part, this paper analyzes the problems on topic-choosing of oral English teaching in China as well as giving suggestions. In this part, some theoretical teaching models are going to be given to illustrate my hypothesis. Finally, the conclusion part emphasizes the significance of topic-choosing in oral English teaching in Chinese middle schools as well as its future based on proper and effective topic-choosing.The research methods adopted in this paper mainly include: empirical analysis, investigation method, comparison analysis method as well as the method of data-collecting.

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