The Empirical Study Of Multiple Intelligence-based Differentiated Instruction In College English

In recent years, both the educators and teachers in college EFL teaching have realized that there are significant differences among the learners in terms of their competence, interests, and intelligence profiles, etc. These differences have great impact on learners'learning process and results. With the expansion of college enrollment, the size of college English classroom is getting bigger and teacher's ability and energy is challenged. Therefore, students'differences are usually ignored and teaching according to students'individual differences is hard. In response to this situation, differentiated instruction is highly valued, which is to differentiate the teaching process, content and assessment to protect the learners'individual differences and to promote all learners'respective progress based on their present levels.In 1983, American psychologist Howard Gardner in his book Frames of Mind proposed the theory of multiple intelligences. He believes that each person has at least seven intelligences (he added the eighth intelligence in the list later) and people are different because they all have different combinations of intelligences. Gardner's MI theory provides an insightful perspective in looking at people's difference and make differentiated instruction possible in large-sized class. There had been a lot of researches and explorations on how to implement differentiated instruction and apply MI theory to practice abroad. In China, most of the studies have been done at primary and middle schools, few have been done at college level, especially in college EFL class. This motivated the author to do this empirical study of MI-based differentiated instruction.The experiment was conducted at the second semester of 2009-2010 school year. The author took 165 sophomores from Chemistry Department of Shijiazhuang College as the study subjects. They were divided into two groups---control group and experimental group. For the control group, the author adopted undifferentiated traditional teaching methodology, which is to teach all students with same content, same method and evaluate them in the same way. While for the experimental group, the author adopted MI-based differentiated instruction, which is to group the students according to their intelligence profiles and to use different content, activities and assessment for each intelligence group. The author employed several instruments, such as Multiple Intelligence Inventory, questionnaires, interviews and tests, etc, to compare the differences in interest, motivation and language competence between the two groups before and after the experiment. The study results showed that after MI-inspired differentiated instruction in this semester, experimental group students improved significantly in their interests, study motivations and language proficiency compared with those of the control group students.This study did a preliminary attempt to apply MI-based differentiated instruction in college EFL class and proved its positive effect on students'learning. Hopefully, it can provide some suggestions and implications for the future related research.