Theapplication Of Constructivism Theory In The Teaching Of Oral-Audio-Visual Course For Vocational College English Majors

With the development of economic globalization, more and more people have an increasing demand to communicate with the foreigners. English has become an international language, and speaking English fluently has become a required skill for the college graduates. As China plays a more and more important role in the world affairs, English teaching has received more and more attention in the colleges. How to improve the students'English abilities is becoming an important and urgent task for English teachers and scholars.The oral-audio-visual English course, which improves the speaking and listening abilities of the students, has gained more attention in the language teaching field. The traditional teaching methods pay more attention to the teacher's function but neglect students'self learning, which being widely used in English teaching emphasize the language rules, and on rote memorization of grammatical rules and vocabulary, and they also neglect the communicative competence. The students'oral and listening English abilities have not been improved effectively in the vocational colleges. Therefore, it is a challenge for English teachers to find effective ways to train and cultivate proficient language personally. There has been a considerable amount of interest in constructivism as a new teaching method. Different from the traditional teacher-centered instruction, constructivism emphasizes the learners'self-construction and the important role context, interaction and dialogue play in the process of meaning construction.A constructivist approach to learning is based on the idea that the learner constructs his or her own knowledge through negotiation of meaning. From the perspective of constructivism theory, this thesis analyzes the importance of the application of constructivism in the oral-audio-visual course of the vocational college English teaching. This paper is written for three main purposes: to reflect present situation of oral-audio-visual English teaching, to introduce the constructivism theory, and to present the application of the constructivism theory in the oral-audio-visual English courses and the suggestions on the results of investigations. On the basis of constructivism theory, a lot of teaching and learning methods have been applied to the classes of business English major. Compared with the traditional teaching methods, the listening and speaking abilities of the students have been significantly improved with all the constructivism-based methods.In order to check out the feasibility and validity of the experimental teaching method in the oral-audio-visual English courses, the author makes a quasi-experiment in college oral-audio-visual English courses for a semester. The oral English and audio-visual English tests, the questionnaires and the interview results can prove that the constructivism theory could be applied into the courses effectively. It is hoped that the research could advance the exploration of oral-audio-visual English teaching in vocational colleges. All the data in the thesis has been conducted by the use of SPSS, and the conclusion has been reached that the constructivism theory could improve the oral-audio-visual English abilities of the students.