Research On The Natural Approach And Its Application To The College English Teaching In A Vocational College

With the "globalization" process, English, as a language tool of international communication, has become one of the moderns'basic qualities that the modern era development requires. However, the "dumb English", China's current level of vocational students in English cannot meet the needs of social development. As to the reason, I think the traditional foreign language teaching hasn't been able to escape its responsibility. Teachers and students are searching for a new teaching method, just like the way of children learning their mother tongue, natural and efficient.Krashen and Terrell's Natural Approach is to create a natural language environment the same as that of children learning their mother tongue, to provide adequate comprehensible language information input that is a little beyond learners'current level of competence, to reduce the learners lack of confidence, excessive anxiety and other affective filter, to make them "naturally acquire" language. If this approach can be applied to our college English teaching in vocational high schools, vocational students'"deaf and dumb English" status quo may be able to change. However, under such conditions as the non-English environment in our country along with the weak English foundation of vocational high school students can the Natural Approach work?This paper attempts to interpret the theory and practice principles of Natural Approach, analyze its strengths and weaknesses, explore its applicability in vocational high school according to our current English teaching situation, then have an experiment in author's college---Applying Natural Approach in college English teaching----to check its applicability. Combine theory with practice, to construct an improved Natural Approach that is suitable for our college English teaching in vocational high schools.Apart from the introduction and concluding remark, this paper contains four chapters. Chapterâ… is to review the appearance of the Natural Approach and the research on it at home and abroad. Chapterâ…¡is to interpret the Natural Approach:theory base, the basic assumptions, core ideas, practical principles and methods, basic features, etc. Chapterâ…¢is to reflect the Natural Approach, combining with the foreign language teaching situation in our country, and to localize theoretically the Natural Approach. Chapterâ…£is to apply the localized Natural Approach to the college English teaching in a vocational college, and to improve the construction of the localized Natural Approach that will be suitable for the vocational college students to learn English via the teaching practice. The key points of the localized Natural Approach are the followings:No.1, Teaching Objective:teaching focuses on language content and form, aims to improve students'linguistics and communication skills; No.2, Teaching Syllabus:on the base of students mastering a certain number of the target language knowledge, develop students'communication capacity with the target language; No.3, Learning Process:the localized Natural Approach encourages teachers to correct students' errors while introducing the language knowledge, but in another period of time, ignore the errors and pay more attention to the activities of promoting students'smooth communication skills; No.4, Teaching Participants:students are the subject of learning, teaching activities are students-centered. Teachers are the learning facilitators, playing different roles at the same time or separately-supervisor of student learning, classroom management, language teaching, consultants, etc; No.5, teachers'Language:Teachers on the one hand should insist on using a second language for students'second language acquisition to create a natural environment, on the other hand, in some specific cases, teachers should be flexible to use mother language to enable students to quickly understand; No.6, Teaching Process:after providing students with adequate explanations of grammatical function, teachers should offer students the right context, to encourage students to communicate in real life with these rules.