Application Of Experiential Learning In Business Oral English Teaching In Vocational College

With the globalization and social demands in business activities , students who can indeed cater to the situation are becoming more and more welcome. They are required to be professional in English and in business communication. Therefore, Business Oral English(BOE) teaching has become a quite important part for English learners at vocational colleges. In consideration of the nature of Business oral English and the features of vocational college students, the thesis is an attempt to apply the experiential learning theory to the business oral English course, in order to engage more students in classroom activities positively, so that the practical value of the course can be realized. With the reference to findings of other scholars, this thesis illustrates experiential learning theory in detail including the history, the basic model and the application of the theory. It pointed out that experiential learning is based on the Constructivist Theory which advocate to provide students with opportunities to construct knowledge. Constructivism holds that students'knowledge and experience should be brought to the learning task. Learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current or past knowledge. Experiential learning also emphasizes the reflection of experiences in the course of study.To better apply experiential learning to business English teaching, an experiment was conducted at Shijiazhuang Science and Information Vocational College. The research instruments included classroom experiment, oral tests, survey and interviews. The teaching experiment was conducted from March 2011 to June 2011, three months altogether. The research subjects are 90 students in the two natural classes of English department in Shijiazhuang Science and Information Vocational College. One class was identified as the experiential class with the teaching approaches based on the experiential learning theory. The other one was identified as the control class maintaining the original teaching state. The process of data collection lasted for 3 months. At first qualitative research was taken to collect data. Then quantitative research was taken through teaching experiment which was designed according to the results from qualitative research. The teaching research was to prove the following hypothesis:(1) Experiential learning can arouse students'enthusiasm and increase the classroom participation.(2) The ability of business oral English can be greatly enhanced through experiential learning. This thesis analyzes the findings from the research and the difficulties of implementation of experiential learning theory into business oral English course.