The purpose of this study is to understand the factors behind Chinese student’s English-speaking proficiency. The hypothesis formed to answer this issue follows: “Large factors influencing Chinese students’ English speech proficiency is an examination-oriented education system, degree of childhood exposure to English and motivational, stress-free learning environments.”  Data has been collected by sending out an anonymous online questionnaire to Chinese students at Swedish Universities, asking about their learning experiences. A criterion for participation was to have taken either the IELTS or the TOEFL. Stephen Krashen’s theories on second language acquisition was used as source material because of its reliability and well-established ideas. Additionally, previous research and data from the IELTS or the TOEFL has also been included. The participants were also asked to include their results from the IELTS or the TOEFL for the purpose of comparing the different categories of reading, writing, speaking and listening ability, with focus placed on factors affecting speech proficiency. Our study found some support for our hypothesis. The results showed that the Chinese English education system places a lot of attention on reading which might deprioritize other parts of language learning such as speaking. The system also promotes examinations, which shapes curriculum into focusing on test results. In short, the testing-based system influence the way students are taught. Participants considering “speaking” to be highly important, but many received low speaking scores.  Our questionnaire showed that many students experienced nervousness when speaking English, the reason for this might be that they have not received comprehensible input and sufficient time to acquire the language, meaning that they are not yet ready to produce natural speech.  Ideally, a larger sample of participants, more survey questions and an in-depth interview with the students would have been preferable and resulted in more reliable results, which can be taken into consideration for future research.

Written and oral material produced by a group of low-achieving learners of English from the 2-year lines of the Swedish upper secondary school was analysed from the perspective of grammatical correctness and communicative ability. The grammatical analysis focussed on the verb phrase and tests included both free production in speech and writing and elicitation tests. Communicative ability was assessed ‘ ‘objectively* ’ by identifying such parameters as fluency, copiousness and span, and “holistically” by using non-expert evaluators.The scores thus obtained were correlated. Grammatical correctness was correlated with communicative ability both in speech and in writing and writing proficiency was correlated with speech proficiency with respect to both grammatical correctness and communicative ability.Our findings are that there is a positive correlation between grammatical correctness and communicative ability. A remarkable finding is that the percentage of correct verb phrases correlates very weakly with communicative ability in written data. In oral data, the correlation is in fact slightly negative. The learner’s competence in grammar is reflected in both his written and oral performance. On the other hand, there is no correlation between communicative ability in writing and communicative ability in speech.The study shows that a working command of a set of syntactic rules is essential for communication. Errors are, however, an integral part of the learning process. The major part of errors are accounted for by the learner’s use of compensatory strategies. Among these low-achievers, communicative ability in conversation is distinct from writing ability. / digitalisering@umu