A Study On The Development And Application Of IELTS Reading Textbook Based On Input Hypothesis For The International Cooperation In Secondary Vocational School

In recent years,many domestic secondary vocational schools have successively launched international cooperation programs with foreign vocational colleges and institutes,establishing international classes and IELTS-related courses with the purpose of aiding students in 5 or higher scores in the IELTS.Nevertheless,a problem perplexing both students and teachers emerged in the implementation of the programs,and that was how to select proper textbooks of IELTS,for the available ones,esp.reading textbooks,almost all designed or compiled by commercial training institutions,were generally longer,harder,tedious and sorely test-oriented for the trainees with higher proficiency,without considering secondary vocational(SV)students’ features.Therefore,IELTS textbooks exclusively developed for SV students became quite indispensable for the relevant courses.Given the above-mentioned situation,in this study,firstly an investigation was conducted to analyze the drawbacks of the old IELTS reading textbook and students’ detailed needs for a more practical one,then on the theoretical basis of Stephen Krashen’ s Input Hypothesis and other related theories,combing SV students’ features and IELTS reading regulations,a new IELTS reading textbook was designed and experimented in the IELTS reading courses in two classes of a SV school,with an attempt to solve the problem of the textbook applicability to the students.The research questions are as follows: 1.How to design an appropriate IELTS reading textbook for SV students on the basis of the Input Hypothesis? 2.Can the new textbook enhance students’ consciousness of English acquisition better? 3.Can the new textbook effectively aid students in attaining higher scores in IELTS reading test?The detailed process of designing the textbook is presented in the fourth chapter of the thesis.The empirical research of the textbooks lasted for twelve weeks in two freshman classes of business English major(International)from a vocational school in Dongguan City,Guangdong Province.Class two was set as the experimental class and taught with the new textbook,while Class three was set as the control class and taught with the old textbook.This study employed quantitative and qualitative methods.Data collected from the IELTS reading pre-test and post-test were analyzed by Excel and SPSS 20.0 as the quantitative result,and the questionnaire and interview were analyzed as the qualitative result.In the post-test,the mean score of the experimental class improved from 17.00 to 19.65,while that of the control class fell down from 20.32 to 13.47.The results of the study show that the new textbook can effectively enhance students’ consciousness of English acquisition,intensively represented in the formation of the habit of actively learning English expressions from objects in daily life,which lays a foundation of improving their scores.Meanwhile,the new textbook has a significant effect on increasing students’ achievements in the IELTS reading test,while the old textbook has even caused students’ scores regress so that the new textbook is more appropriate for students.