MIT-based Oral English Teaching In College

Foreign language teaching aims to cultivate students'oral and written communicative competences. In China, oral competence is always neglected in college English teaching. However, lots of emphases on reading and writing skills in college English teaching result in an outcome that a number of non-English majors who have learnt English more than ten years can not communicate with others in English. Based on the problems above, this paper attempts to analyze how to apply MIT to college English teaching so as to cultivate students'oral English competence.MIT poses that human intelligence is multiple, and the intelligence consists of dominate intelligence and weak intelligence. Through integrating these two kinds of intelligences, different intelligences characteristics and styles of human beings can be formed. Based on MIT, teachers should pay attention to students'individual differences and change traditional teaching concepts as well as teaching styles. They have to design various classroom activities, organize teaching procedures and simulate learners' positivity and self-confidences, which aim to build a "student-centered" classroom. Whereas, in retrospect, most of researches on MIT focus on the macro-teaching of college English teaching, and few of them pay attention to four skills "listening", "speaking", "reading" and "writing" respectively.The present study attempts to probe into the following problems:(i) how to conduct MIT-based oral English teaching in current college English class; (ii) whether MIT-based college English teaching can improve learners'oral English proficiency; (iii) whether learners'learning performance can be changed in MIT-based oral English class; (iv) which kinds of activities are efficient and popular with learners.Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted to test students' oral English proficiency in this study, containing Survey Method, Observational Method and Experimentation. The participants are 160 sophomores from basic and intermediate level classes respectively in a normal university. Results gained from the study are in the following:MIT-based oral English teaching can be conducted in current college English class; students' oral proficiency can be improved after MIT-based oral English teaching, especially in fluency, accuracy, express ability and overall intelligibility; students' learning interests can be aroused, and the climates of English classes are more active; some activities are beneficial for improving students'oral English proficiency, such as role play, debate and dubbing. It is hoped that this study may provide some insights into college oral English teaching, thereby assisting the development of college English teaching.