Construction Of Competence-based IT Professional English Teaching Model In HVE

Competence-based vocational education is the direction of the vocational education reform currently all over the world. It was introduced to China during the 1980s, and expanded in 1990s. The competence-based vocational education is employment-oriented, and its main characteristic is that the professional competence is the basis of teaching and determines the teaching objectives as well as the assessment criteria. It emphasizes the practical skills of learners and the professional competence is what the learners demonstrate when completing job-related tasks. Recently, the competence orientation has been embedded into the research and the practice of English teaching and learning in higher vocational colleges in China. The objective of the English teaching in higher vocational colleges is to develop students'professional competence, while the present English teaching ignores the professional requirements in students. The traditional form-centered, teacher-centered, and textbook-centered language teaching model fails to develop students'professional competence.Under the guidance of the competence-based theory and taking into account the present situation of English teaching in higher vocational colleges, this thesis constructs a competence-based IT professional English teaching model with the reference to the three typical competence-based vocational education models and three competence-based language teaching methods. This model consists of six parts: guided autonomous learning, overview lectures, Readiness Assurance Test (RAT), instruction, practice, and assessment. First, the students try to acquire the knowledge and skills in a learning unit through autonomous learning with the help of learning packages and teacher's guidance. Then they consolidate and construct their own system of knowledge and skills after the overview lectures. The RAT is designed to check the mastery of essential knowledge so as to support the follow-up development of skills. Then teachers will provide instruction based on the results of the RAT. During the practice phase, the professional competence, especially the language communicative competence, will be developed through the following three stages: demonstration and instruction, supervised practice and application. The assessment system in the model employs both the formative and summative assessments to evaluate professional competence in each phase.In order to confirm its applicability and feasibility in IT English teaching for higher vocational colleges, the model was implemented in the IT English course in a HVE college. Two classes from IT-related majors were selected for the experiment. One class, as the experimental group, was taught with the competence-based IT English teaching model; the other, as the control group, was instructed with the traditional teacher-centered teaching model. After one year's teaching, the author finds that the competence-based teaching model, to some extent, shows advantages in improving students'professional language communicative competence, especially the speaking and listening skills. Meanwhile, students'key competencies related to their future profession were enhanced by employing this model. However, the result of the experiment hasn't indicated much improvement in developing the students'writing skills.Analysis of domestic and overseas reference documents, survey of the questionnaire, interviews and the experiment method are the four methods adopted in the research.This research on the competence-based IT professional English teaching model is in accordance with the competence-oriented objectives of the current higher vocational education (HVE) reform. It is an initial attempt to apply the notions of competence-based education to the development of HVE IT majors'language communicative competence and comprehensive professional competence. But more efforts should be made to improve this model in the aspects such as the teaching method and the assessment system.