An Investigation Into Vocational College Students' Inactive Participation In English Class

According to the Basic Requirements for HVTE English Course issued in the year of 2000, English teaching should aim at developing students' communicative competence, especially listening and speaking, which are the basic skills required to meet the needs of students' future jobs.However, after a close investigation into 149 sophomores' current English learning situation in the Vocational College of Northwest University, the author finds that the status quo is far from satisfactory. Many students are weakly motivated and show no interest in English learning. The predominant passiveness in English class has become a hard nut to crack for English teachers. As teaching and learning are two-way interactive and dynamic processes, without the active participation of students, achieving the teaching goal will be impossible. Therefore, the present research is conducted with a purpose of exploring the possible causes that interfere with vocational college students' active participation in English class so as to upgrade the efficacy of teaching and learning at vocational colleges.In this study, 149 non-English major sophomores in the Vocational College of Northwest University were chosen as the subjects. A mixed methodology of both qualitative and quantitative research was adopted, In the qualitative research, by means of questionnaires, classroom observations and interviews, both students and teachers were investigated. The questionnaire was then computed and analyzed statistically by Excel. The analysis explored the relationship between students' inactive participation in class and their difficulties in language producing process, interferences from affective factors as well as teachers' feedbacks to students' errors.The finding of the study shows that the major factors that inhibit vocational college students' active participation in class are: 1) difficulties in language producing process; 2) affective interferences; 3) teachers' way of error treatment.Based on the major findings of the study, the author finally ventures some suggestions on how to solve the above problems, e.g., repetition, paraphrasing, positive feedback, etc., to activate vocational college students' participation in English class.