Classroom Application Of Input-Output Theory

This thesis covers an experimental study concerning the college English teaching to overseas students with the application of Krashen's"Comprehensible Input Hypothesis"and Swain's"Output Theory". As more and more overseas students come to China for higher education, the quality of English teaching to the overseas students has become increasingly important for a school's international competitiveness. The thesis intends to improve the English teaching to overseas students by addressing the following challenges: low enthusiasm, weak English language base, poor classroom input quality. Combining"Comprehensible Input Hypothesis"and"Output Theory", the thesis proposed"reflection-inquiry-modification"teaching method, and proved its effectiveness with a classroom experiment.With the"reflection-inquiry-modification"teaching method proposed in this study, the students were assigned a pre-unit writing on topics related to the unit going to be covered. They were encouraged to find solutions to their language problems in their writing, and were free to ask teacher for help by writing their problems and the Chinese version down. With the pre-unit writing, the teacher could identify their language problems and get to know their background, which enabled the teacher to give solution to general difficulties, to give a systemic review of some English language knowledge, and to link the new input to their background. In this way, the input quality and English teaching were improved.In the experiment conducted in this study, 36 overseas seniors of University of International Business and Economics have participated as subjects. There were a pretest and posttest for two classes to examine the effectiveness of the new teaching method. At the same time, a questionnaire was employed to find the feasibility of this study. There are four major findings:1) The students became more active in English learning and generated need for new language input with pre-unit writing.2) Pre-unit writing helped the students to strengthen their English language base to certainextent.3) The students in the experimental class acquire more comprehensible input than the students in the controlled class.4) The comparison of the pretest and posttest results shows that the"reflection-inquiry-modification"teaching method improves English teaching.This study not only contributes to the improvement of the English teaching to overseas students, but also has implications for the general English teaching in China.