Chapter one Introduction
1.1Research Background
With the increasingly demand for advanced applied personals with professionalknowledge, higher vocational education is flourishing. As a Public discipline, English foreveroccupies a very important position. Especially, it is true of the economical globalization inmodern society. Therefore, English teaching in higher vocational college draws moreattention. For many years, there are more and more students enrolling in higher vocationalcollege, but one situation does not change at all— their relatively low English level and vagueawareness of English learning, which result in the language ability not being improved asideally as their expectation by the end of three years’ learning in the college.Before writing this paper, the author went into several higher vocational colleges tomake a questionnaire about the students’ English learning needs. The result shows that 80percent students hope that after graduating from three years’ learning, they can apply Englishto their jobs; 15 percent would like to learn English to lay a firm foundation for their futurestudy in the university or even postgraduate studying; only 5 percent consider going abroadand current English learning will benefit their everyday communication. According to thisstatistics, it can be seen that the students themselves in higher vocational college still have thespecific English learning objectives. Happily, student’s learning willingness is in accord with“priority to practical, aim to application” proposed by The Basic Requirement for HigherVocational and Technical Education English Course published by Higher Education Press inOctober, 2000. But as for language teachers, how to achieve this goal in The BasicRequirement and by which means to realize the students’ learning demands for English andhow to establish a set of system to examine whether this goal is fulfilled should be taken intoconsidered.
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1.2The Significance of the Research
No doubt that the traditional 3P teaching approach has not been the main method forlanguage teachers. Most teachers have realized the advantages of Task Based Approach andput it into use. At the meantime, the advantages and effectiveness have been proved byresearchers with many empirical studies. So is it in higher vocational college Englishclassroom. TBA cannot only appeal to students’ interests in English more than 3p does, butmake the students more willingly throw themselves into the English classroom as a master aswell. Just as what the author has found in visiting English classes, many language teachershave adopted TBA in their classes, but there are still one in three students not willing todevote themselves to carrying out the tasks designed by teachers. In fact, these students’English level is not as bad as we imagine. On earth what causes this phenomenon on thisoccasion? So we have to analyze the students’ learning needs before giving lessons. Thequestionnaire made by the author for leaning needs reveals that 80 percent students hope thatafter graduating from three years’ learning, they can apply English to their jobs—applyEnglish to their specialized fields and communicate in English. So let’s imagine whether wecan design the tasks and contexts in TBA closer to the students’ majors, whether this canimprove the students’ interests in learning English and satisfy their needs for learning English.
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Chapter Two The Theoretical Base of this Research
2.1 Constructivism theory
About the learning theories researches, there are behaviorist learning theory, cognitivelearning theory and constructivism in sequence. While in the modern education,constructivism learning and teaching theories take up the dominated status.Constructivism, being a branch of cognitive psychology, was proposed by J. Piaget fromSwitzerland who is the most influential psychologist in the field of cognition. Aboutconstructivism, Piaget’s basic view is that the cognition to outside world is constructedgradually during the interaction between children and surroundings thus making their owncognitive structure developed. (From that, it can be inferred that in the process of children’sconstructing cognition, surroundings serves as an indispensable function.) In this process,“assimilation” and “accommodation” are the two basic processes happening in the interactionbetween children and surroundings. Assimilating refers to incorporating new experiences intothe old experiences and being integrated into the cognition the children have already had. Thiscauses the inpidual to develop new outlooks, rethink what were once misunderstandings,and evaluate what is important, ultimately altering their perceptions. Accommodation, on theother hand, is recombining and reframing the world and new experiences into the mentalcapacity already present when surroundings change and old cognition couldn’t assimilate it.That is to say when things do not operate within that context, they must accommodate andreframing the expectations with the outcomes. From above, we can see that “assimilation” isthe expansion of cognitive amount while “accommodation” is the alteration of cognitiveproperty. Cognitive inpidual just keeps balance with the context through such “assimilation”and “accommodation” .When children can assimilate the new information with their existedcognition, they are in the balanceable state of cognition. On the contrary, this kind of balanceis destroyed. However, accommodation is to seek new balance. Children’s cognitive structureis gradually constructed in the process of assimilation and accommodation and it can beenriched, enhanced and developed in the cycle of “balance-unbalance- new balance”.
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2.2 Task-Based Approach
Task-base approach stresses on tasks running through the whole class which are used toorganize the classroom teaching. Students are expected to carry out the task by means ofparticipating, interacting and cooperating, fully exerting their original cognitive ability,redeploying their language resources which they have owned and to perceive, cognize andapply the target language during the practice. It advocates “learning by doing, learning byusing”. It was Vygotsky who came up with this language teaching viewpoint. When he wasobserving the learners’ studying process, he got this important inspiration—in languagelearning, the learner’s interaction between teacher and classmates could accelerate hislanguage learning positively. Vygotsky especially emphasized sociality and the interactionbetween human beings in the course of language learning, which can be embodied efficientlyin the form of “task”.
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Chapter Three The Current English Teaching Situation and Problemse.......22
3.1Insufficiency of Teachers’ Theory on TBLT........22
3.2 Tasks and Contexts cannot arouse the Students’ Enthusiasm for Maximum. . ...23
3.3 The Students’ Poor Performance in the Group Collaboration......... ....24
3.4The Evaluation Method Cannot Objectively Reflect the Student’s LearningSituations .....25
Chapter Four The Experimental Study.......26
4.1 Objective.........26
4.2 Hypothesis....26
4.3 Subject....26
4.4 Instrument....26
4.5 Procedures....27
4.6 A case of experiment implementation.........29
4.7 Data collection and analysis......33
Chapter Five Conclusion....38
5.1 A brief summary of the paper.......38
5.2 Suggestions on adopting TBLT in higher vocational clooege......39
5.3 Limitation of this research......39
Chapter Four The Experimental Study
4.1 Subject
The subjects in this research consist of one teacher and two classes-controlled class andexperimental class in Heilongjiang Higher Vocational College. Two classes’ students all majorin nursing from class6 and class 7, 2001. The number of students in the two classes is 48separately. Their average entrance exam scores are vey nearly the same—controlled class is70 and experimental class is 68.2. These students are all from Heilongjiang province, ageand educational qualifications are equal. In this experiment, teaching schedules of the twoclasses are the same and share the same teacher. Class six is controlled class and class seven isexperimental class. All the two class used the same teaching material—New Essential College English bookI published in Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. This book consists of 10 units,which will be learned in two terms. Each unit contains main reading, exercises, relatedreading and writing. This teaching material is the general higher education “15” nationalplanning materials, recommended by Ministry of Education as Foreign language teachingmaterials for Higher Vocational College.
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Conclusion
In this experiment, the author make a research on how to design task and how to pidegroup collaboration can improve students’ English learning interests, initiative andconfidence.From comparing the pre-test questionnaire and post-test questionnaire, we can clearlysee that the students’ English learning interests, initiative and confidence have been improvedgreatly in EC, but those in CC, their English learning interests and initiative are lower than thestudents’ in EC. Through the results, we can assure that the hypothesis is efficient, namely,the task connected with students’ major can develop students’ interests, initiative andconfidence in learning English in higher vocational college.And from the results of written test and oral test before and after experiment, we can alsoconfirm that this hypothesis is beneficial to students’ cognitive structure and meaningconstruction because the testing average scores in EC are higher than those in CC.
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Reference (omitted)