Role-exchange Between The Teacher And Students In English Teaching At Vocational Colleges

Society-oriented education is increasingly attaching importance to language practical skills. Especially at vocational schools, students are trained to survive and succeed in the near future career experience with their practical skills and competence, which should be acquired initially at school.Dell H. Hymes' theory of communicative competence provides language teaching an enormous developing and maturing space, and also has brought, and is still bringing innovations and improvements to language and foreign language teaching.English teaching's final goal is to develop students' language communicative competence. At vocational colleges, English teaching has its own characters: vocation-oriented, practical skills-focused and communication-oriented. Also, vocational colleges students are different from students at other colleges. They are at lower language learning levels and they prefer to learning language in communication determined by their distinguished learning motivations.On the basis of Dell H. Hymes' theory of communicative competence, combined with the English learning and teaching at vocational colleges, the role-exchange teaching approach is developed, and has been initially put into teaching practice. The most obvious characteristics of this teaching approach are the following three: 1) It is communication-oriented; 2) It is student-centered; 3) It possesses adjustable applicability.In the role-exchange teaching practice, all the classroom activities are communication-oriented and student-centered. It aims at giving students more chances to develop language communicative competence by practicing different language practical skills in varied student-centered classroom communicative activities with the teacher's instruction and help. The teacheracts mainly as an instructor and an organizer, and also as a participant of those activities. Students are active communicators in those organized situations rather than language learners. Students even can act as a teacher to organize the class activities in the role of a teacher. Of course, the teacher is still definitely important with his/her necessary instruction and direction to students' communicative activities in the class.After one semester's teaching practice, this approach is proved to be a successful English teaching approach at vocational colleges. First, students' interest in learning English has been improved. Second, English teaching is not a boring ritual duty for teachers any more; it turns out to be creative communication with students. Students' participation and interaction enrich classroom teaching content, and give the teacher new appreciation of teaching. Thirdly, the most important one, students' language competence has been gradually improved. Among all the aspects of communicative competence, pragmatic aspects are better improved compared with the linguistic aspects, for they have more in connection with the spoken language.With its adjustable applicability illustrated by different instructions and requirements for different student-centered classroom activities from the teacher, the role-exchange teaching approach applies not only to the vocational college English teaching, but also to the undergraduate colleges' English teaching on some degree.