A Study On The Application Of "Information-Gap" Principle In First-Year College English Classes

The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), rooted in the 60's Europe and America, has been paid more and more attention to. As one of the basic principles in CLT,"Information-gap"(IG) principle is also attached great importance to by some college English teachers nowadays in China. In recent more than ten years, many English teachers have tried to apply this principle in teaching practice, some of whom once made great progress. But most English teachers are still following the traditional Grammar-Translation method and paying great attention to the linguistic forms instead of the function and meaning. Thus it greatly influences the cultivation of students'communicative competence, and turns into one of the major causes of"mute English".By introducing the basic theory of"IG"principle, the related theoretical basis and its current situation of application in Chinese college English classes, this paper firstly analyzes the necessity and advantages of utilizing this principle in first-year college English classes, and then tries to prove the hypothesis that the incorporation of"IG"principle is more effective than the mere traditional English teaching approach in improving students'grammatical accuracy and communicative fluency and in arousing students'learning interest and motivation. In the process of proving the above hypothesis, two types of studies were employed in this research: a survey study and an experimental study. In the survey study, 197 students from four universities and 80 college English teachers in Nanjing city were asked to fill in the close-ended questionnaires and some of them were interviewed. In the one-semester-long experimental study two classes from Jinling Institute of Science and Technology were involved. One class with 39 students was chosen as the experimental group, which was taught with the incorporation of"IG"principle into the traditional English teaching approach, while the other class with 35 students was chosen as the control group, which was taught with the traditional approach. In the experiment, both classes had an oral test and a CET-4 simulation test before and after the experiment. The data of the survey study and the experimental study were attained through the questionnaires, interviews, classroom observations and tests. The analyses of data have generated the following findings:In current college English teaching based on the traditional English teaching approach, it is quite necessary to incorporate the"IG"principle into the traditional English teaching approach. On the one hand, the incorporation of"Information-gap"principle is more effective than the mere traditional English teaching approach in improving students'grammatical accuracy and communicative fluency; on the other hand, it can also largely arouse students'learning interest and motivation.Finally, the author summarizes the implications of this research, points out the limitations and provides some suggestions for further study.