An Empirical Study On IT-integrated EST Reading With Review On IT-based Language Teaching

The latest syllabus for English majors of higher education stresses on the issue of cultivating talents with mixed abilities to meet the needs of the society. EST (English for Science and Technology) is one of the important courses on cultivating student's comprehensive ability.Actually, EST Reading is a hard nut for English teachers to crack. It has its own features on rhetoric, grammar and lexis, which tell it apart from GE (General English). It carries a lot of subject-matter information on science and technology as well. Being lack of the subject-matter knowledge, it is difficult for the English majors to make any sense from the reading passages, and their efforts on the learning of EST rhetoric tend to be less effective. All too often the teachers find themselves busy explaining the knowledge and have little time on the language.Thanks to information technology, it renovates the traditional teaching method. It makes the class vivid and attractive. Various types of IT-based language teaching are developed on the basis of language theories. Recently, cognitive constructivism, which evolves from cognitive theory suggests a new approach to study how learners get knowledge. It is found that knowledge is constructed through the process of adapting to the events and ideas one experiences. Constructivism has now been the guiding theory of IT-based language teaching. Meanwhile, the traditional courseware evolves into the novel integrableware in the process of practice.Guided by constructivism, combined with the latest development of IT for education, and based on an empirical study, a teaching approach with information technology integrated is suggested for EST Reading in this thesis: to integrate the facilities available, and put the courseware in a integrable way for flexible use.