Mastery Learning Theory In Adult ESL Teaching

The thesis demonstrates the feasibility and the effectiveness of the Mastery Learning theory in adult ESL learners.Mastery Learning theory was a learning theory of class put forward by B·S·Bloom, a famous psychologist in education and expert in course in America. This theory takes an importance of the feedback and formative evaluation which are exactly neglected by the traditional way of teaching during the process of teaching. Most of the ESL adult learners have some basic knowledge of English and the problem that confronts most of them is some misunderstandings of the language knowledge and the use of the language. The immediate feedback and the frequently used formative evaluation of the Mastery Learning theory can help the adult ESL learners to clarify their misunderstandings on time. By this way the Mastery Learning theory remedies the traditional way of teaching in which the teacher usually neglect whether the students had mastered the knowledge the teacher taught.The study employs an experiment which lasted four months. Subjects were 2006 freshman from the two nature classes in the Continuous education college of Dalian University of Technology. The experimental group (N=40) and the control group (N=40) were in the same starting point. The former were taught by the teacher with the Mastery Learning theory, while the latter receives the traditional method. Pre-test, post-test, questionnaires and interview were taken to compare and measure the two groups of the students. Multivariate and discriminate analyses of the measures indicate that the experimental group did significantly better than the control group at the end of the semester. This was a strong evidence to infer that the Mastery Learning theory was prior to the traditional one in teaching ESL adult learners. The bottleneck problem that faces most of the adult learners was broken.In conclusion, the result of the experiment reveals that the use of the Mastery Learning theory in adult ESL learners is effective and feasible.