| With the advent of "humanism" in the 60s of the 20th century, in foreign countries especially in educationally developed countries like the UK and the USA, the conventional, authoritative teacher-centered model has given way to the learner-centered model of instructions. Educators started paying attention to the impact that learners' affective factors (e.g., their feelings, emotions, tension, anxiety, frustration, needs, interests, motivation, and confidence, etc.) may bring in the process of learning. Then people have witnessed the birth and maturing of some innovative ELT approaches, methods, and techniques during the 70s to the 80s, such as The Silent Way, Community Language Learning, Total Physical Response (TPR), Suggestopedia, The Natural Approach, Communicative Approach, Cooperative Learning, Interactive Learning and Whole Language Learning. In the 90s, Dr. Howard Gardner, a distinguished American cognitive psychologist, suggested from his research findings (1983, 1993 and 1995) that human cognitive competence actually is pluralistic, rather than unitary, in design. His Multiple Intelligences Theory ( MIT) touched off a wave of educational innovation not only in the United States but also throughout the world. Educators began to recognize the diversity of the learners in their learning styles, learning potentials, etc. and appreciate the development of learning strategies on the part of the learners.In our country, however, owing to various reasons, educational ideas and teaching methods are still lagging behind. In the field of teaching, especially in English teaching, the teacher-centered model is still more popular. The teacher-centered model leads to a time-consuming but low-efficiency result. After quite a few years of English study, most students remain "dumb" and "deaf in communicating in English. Things are even worse with students in art schools. They even havedifficulty in most basic communications in English. In view of the above-mentioned conditions, we try to put the MIT into classroom teaching practice in the hope of raising the students' interest of art schools and elevating their English levels. Besides Introduction and Conclusion, the thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter 1 is the Literature review of the research on the nature of human intelligence. We have introduced some views of several renowned psychologists, including the views of earlier scholars, such as Gall and Piaget, and the views of present scholars, such as Howard Gardner and Sternberg. Then we have introduced Multiple Intelligence Theory proposed by Howard Gardner to provide the theoretical basis for the following research.In Chapter 2, an investigation is conducted among teachers and students in Hunan Art School. The investigation covers three parts: (1) Teacher Checklist;(2) Student Profile;(3) Student Inventory Form. The first investigation is to get to know the current English teaching status especially in art schools. The second is to have a thorough knowledge of students' study interests, motivation, and their likes towards music and drawing to know students' intellectual features, including their strengths and weaknesses. The third one is to re-present students' interests and tendencies to English study, and at the same time, to touch students' studying motivation. The results of the investigation conform to the author's expectation.Chapter 3 talks about the teachers' work before applying MIT to English teaching. It mainly covers building students' intellectual files, altering students' beliefs in themselves, developing teaching styles and approaches, improving teachers' personality and creating positive beliefs in students, etc.Chapter 4 mainly deals with the application of MIT to English language teaching in art schools, and the assessment of Mi-inspiredteaching. In this chapter we have designed some very interesting activities, such as singing songs, story-telling, role-play, drama, etc in English. The last part of this chapter talks about the assessment of Mi-inspired teaching.
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