信息差任务对高职英语口语课堂教学效果影响的实证研究
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
For the sake of the adaption to the rapid development of vocational education and of the improvement of the teaching quality of the English language in vocational colleges, vocational college English teaching is oriented to cultivate students’ application capacity of practical English and to highlight the practicability and pertinence of the teaching material, as indicated in the Fundamental Requirements for English Course Teaching in Vocational Colleges issued by the Ministry of Education in October, 2000. To improve students’ overall English communicative competence, the oral English teaching is a key part. However, things so far in vocational English teaching are not going well. There are lots of reasons that can account for this. Generally speaking, for one thing, vocational college students have relatively low English proficiency and they lack interest in learning English. Moreover, back to their primary and middle school education, oral English teaching does not receive due attention throughout the whole process. For the other, nowadays in most vocational college English classrooms, it is the teaching of language forms, rather than practical application of the language that still dominates the English class. This directly results in the phenomenon that students refuse to open their mouth to speak English and to actively get themselves involved in class activities. Therefore, it remains an urgent and significant task to improve the oral English teaching quality in vocational college English classes.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance
Taking two classes of non-English major students who entered Shandong Yingcai University in 2012 as participants, two purposes are to be achieved throughout this empirical study. Theoretically, it aims to enrich those studies by incorporating the Information Gap principle into vocational college English teaching. Practically, feasibility and validity of the study on the effectiveness that Information Gap tasks have on the improvement of vocational college students’ oral English competence are going to be proved. Andenlightenment is hoped to be drawn at the end of the study for English teachers to better achieve their teaching objectives. In the 21st century, as the information society is booming and business communications among the global countries are developing rapidly, an increasingly great demand of people who have a good command of a foreign language burst out. English, then, as the lingua franca, particularly stands out in international exchanges. And among the five basic skills that the English language learners have to acquire, oral English skill plays an especially significant role in various activities, such as job interviews, negotiations with foreign trades, foreign visits, and cultural exchanges, etc. Therefore, English learning, especially oral English learning, has become a much more urgent and necessary task than ever before.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Information and the Information Gap
For starters, the word “information” has to be made clear first by definition for the purpose of a better understanding of the information gap principle,. The word “information” enjoys a quite long history. As early as over 2000 years ago, in the West Han Dynasty, the word has appeared and referred to news or message as a daily expression. But with times going on, the word “information” developed into a technical term in information theory. Its emergence can be dated back to an article in title of Transmission of Information by R. V. Hartely. He defined that information referred to those that contains new content and new knowledge. Later on, various definitions of information sprang up. In 1948, Dr. C. E. Shannon came up with a mathematical definition in A Mathematical Theory of Communication that information is to eliminate randomness and uncertainty and he also brought up the concept of the amount of information and the computing method of information entropy, laying a foundation for the information theory. Pro. Norbert Wiener, in the book of Cybernetics: on Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, proposed that information is a term for the content exchanged with the outer world when people are adapting to and controlling the outer world. Besides, Ashby, a British scholar, and the Italian scholar G. Longo also published their views and thoughts on information respectively in 1956 and 1975. From the above we can see that different scholars hold different views on the definition of information. When it comes down to the social communicative activities, the above understandings of information are far from enough. The word “information” must hold some meanings or it should be the carrier of meanings. To put it simply, information is the part of a message and this part carries meaning.
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2.2 Theoretical Basis of Information Gap Task
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) enjoys a quite long history which can be dated back to the late 1960s (Richards and Rogers, 1986). At that time, the audio-lingual and Grammar-translation method dominated the field of language teaching and gradually educators and linguists grew dissatisfied with such method. And their dissatisfaction hastened the occurrence of Communicative Language Teaching. Running contrary to the emphasis on grammar and vocabulary of the audio-lingual and grammar-translation method, the Communicative Language Teaching approach gives much importance to language functions. And the communicative activities in which real language in daily life situation is used are more often stressed (Xie Jiangwei, 2001). A governing principle is that students can be directed to appropriately apply these language forms to various contexts for varied purposes. Its core belief about language teaching is to teach students how to use the language to achieve certain language goals, rather than teach them sets of grammatical rules and fragmentary words usages. (Liu Dan, 2012: 74) Lots of researchers have contributed much to the development of CLT (Brumfit & Johnson, 1979; Nunan, 1989; Yalden, 1983; Richards & Rodgers, 1986). A common belief held by those researchers is that students are involved in real or nearly realistic CLT activities, and these activities put less stress on the accuracy of the language. Harmer separated the communicative activities from non-communicative activities and he shows the differences in the following table.
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Chapter 3 Methodology ....21
3.1 Questions.......21
3.2 Participants....21
3.3 Instruments....22
3.3.1 Questionnaire ....23
3.3.2 Interview ....23
3.3.3 Test ......24
3.4 Procedures, Data Collection and Analysis .....25
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion..........26
4.1 Results and Discussion of the Questionnaires ......26
4.2 Results and Discussions of Pre-test and Post-test........30
4.3 Results and Discussions of Interviews....33
Chapter 5 Conclusion........35
5.1 Major Findings.....35
5.2 Implications..........36
5.3 Limitations of the Present Research .......40
5.4 Suggestions for Further Research ....41
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion
4.1 Results and Discussion of the Questionnaires
In order that the results could be compared distinctively and clearly, the researcher converted the original data of the questionnaires to percentage with the decimal points eliminated. The following Table 4.1 demonstrates the results clearly.The above data show clearly the diverse changes of the participants’ attitude towards spoken English class, their enthusiasm in participating in class learning and their spoken English performance. For a better comprehension of these changes, the researcher chose several typical items for the following further analysis. According to the above figures, item 1&2 are about participants’ motivation to learn spoken English. In general, in higher vocational college students’ oral English learning, learning motivation acts a crucial part. Good learning motivation brings about positive result on oral English learning. With such a learning motivation, students will certainly develop persistent interest and will willingly devote time and energy to the learning goal attainment. The data shown above have obviously demonstrated that the experimental group relatively enjoys better learning motivation than the control group. In the experimental group, 91% of the participants claim that they learn spoken English to actually apply it in the future. Yet in the control group, 75% of the participants show a consensus that they learn oral English just to pass the CET-4 oral test. It is quite clear that the motivation of passing exams can not last long and participants with such motivation, therefore, lack persistent passion in improving their oral English competence. The above analysis illustrates the great help that information-gap tasks brings to the establishment of participants’ long-term learning motivation in the Experimental Class and will help to motivate their interests in spoken English learning.
Conclusion
The present study has focused first on the effectiveness of implementing information gap principle to teaching spoken English in vocational colleges and then aims to draw some inspirations in the end to facilitate English teachers to better achieve their teaching objectives. Up to now, the research goals have been satisfactorily achieved, which will be illustrated in the present chapter. Besides, this chapter also gives elaborations on the limitations of the present study. And for better research in the future, suggestions will also be given. By means of an empirical study, the researcher has analyzed the results of the questionnaires, interviews, tests and classroom observations and made corresponding discussions in the previous chapter. The detailed analysis illustrates that contrary to the traditional teaching methods, oral English teaching with the aid of information gap principle could produce obvious effectiveness
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The reference (omitted)
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