Application Of Output Theory To English Teaching In Vocational Schools

The aims of a language teaching course are very commonly defined in terms of four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. "Speaking and writing are said to be active, or productive skills whereas listening and reading are said to be passive, or receptive skills".Research on language receptive and productive skills is an aspect which has received much attention, because the language skills are believed to be key variables in FL/L2 development. Up to now, researches on four skills of language learning in western countries tend to believe that the productive skills of the language learners can be well developed if the language learners are efficient in receptive skills. Krashen's input hypothesis has been introduced to foreign languages teaching in China. In their teaching process, teachers pay great attention to the receptive skills - listening and reading for the purpose of improving students' speaking and writing. However, this concept has confused us for a long period of time, because although much of the teaching has been focused, the students' language abilities have not been very well developed. Much time has been spent on English learning, but little has been gained from it. "Dumb English", "time-consuming and painstaking" are the problems existing in English teaching in China.So here rises the question: Is enough practice in receptive skills essential to SLA? Can SLA be developed only by a lot of comprehensible input? We hold that more attention should be paid to the learners' productive skills. We shouldn't mechanically apply western teaching methodologies to our foreign languages teaching because the language acquisition environments in China are quite different from those inwestern countries. We should make use of strong points of the theory and get rid of the weakness. We should do our own research work and try to find teaching methods that suit the English teaching in our country. The present thesis includes two empirical studies. One is the study on the characteristics of the English teaching and the present state of students' receptive and productive skills in vocational schools. The subjects involved were 94 first graders in Hunan Industry Polytechnic. The students were chosen by way of random sampling. They were asked to have oral and written tests. The condition of the students' ability to use the four English skills was quantified for analysis. Also involved in this study were 507 second graders from four different vocational schools in Changsha District, Hunan Province. The four different vocational schools are Hunan Mass Media Professional Technical College, Hunan Biological and Electromechanical Polytechnic, Changsha Aeronautical Vocational and Technical College and Hunan Industry Polytechnic. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of the results show that the students' ability of using four English skills is poor, which is reflected in the following:Firstly, the teaching methods are mostly teacher-centered. There is more teacher talk than student talk in class. Most students are passive in class. Teachers' questions lack the value of real communication because most of the questions are raised to inculcate students with knowledge. There are few questions that stimulate the students to communicate or to have free talk.Secondly, the students in vocational schools have learned considerable declarative knowledge, but they haven't mastered enough procedural knowledge. Comparatively speaking, they are fairly strong intheir thinking abilities and receptive skills, but they are very poor in their spoken language. They can't make themselves understood because of frequent pauses, pronunciation errors, limited grasp of vocabulary, and lack of grammatical control. Their ability to write is even worse. They gave vague expressions in their writings, they couldn't express themselves accurately, coherently and appropriately.The other is the study on a proposed teaching method—output-oriented English teaching. On the basis of the findings of the first study, the author proposes output-oriented English teaching, which focuses on the students' output by getting the students involved in more practice on productive skills. An experimental study was conducted on the students of two contrastive classes from September 2004 to June 2005. In June 2005, the students were given an oral test and a written test. The results of the comparative study prove that the output-oriented teaching method has significant influence on the overall language proficiency of vocational students, especially on improving the students' writing skill and their interactive communication competence.