A Study On The Application Of Project-Based Approach In Professional English Teaching In Vocational Colleges

With the rapid development of global economy, such fields as business, tourism, sports and information have set high demand on English proficiency. Therefore, there is an increasing demand on the interdisciplinary professional talents in every field. People who have a good command of professional knowledge and English are quite popular with enterprises, especially foreign companies. Many higher education schools have established professional English curriculum or faculties to cater for the situation. The characteristic of professional English curriculum is occupational orientation, practicality orientation and wide application, therefore, the teaching methods should be different from traditional teaching methods. However, many teachers in HVC still adopt traditional teaching methods thus decrease the students'learning initiative of professional English. Consequently, students'English proficiency can't meet the needs of their future jobs. It is obvious that it is of great necessity to reform the present teaching approach of professional English in HVC.Project-base Approach (PBA) is an approach in which all the professional knowledge will be reorganized into several or many teaching projects to be finished by the students cooperatively under the guidance of the teacher. With the development and reform of education, many countries all over the world began to introduce PBA to reform teaching. China also tried PBA at the end of 20th century, for example, Guangzhou Art College introduced PBA in 1984 and applied it to the teaching of environmental art design. Increasing attention has been paid to the project approach in higher vocational colleges during recent years. As can be seen, many papers and works concerning PBA have been published, however, most of them mainly focused on its application in the teachings of engineering courses.Quite recently many researchers have proved that the project-based approach can be used in language teaching such as English teaching.However,as far as the author knows,few has proved that the project approach is really an effective method in teaching professional English in HVC.Being unsatisfied with the traditional teaching approaches for professional English and curious about the project approach,the author of this paper carried out an experimental research.The study employs the methods of comparative research, survey research, including questionnaire, questionnaire survey and interview and experimental methodology. The methods of dealing with study results mainly adopt quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.The quantitative research includes a one-semester experiment and two questionnaires . The experimental objects are students from two classes, majoring in Business English, Grade 2009 in Rizhao Polytechnic. Class one is the control class (CC), and class two experimental class (EC). The author adopts traditional teaching approach in CC, while PBA in EC. The scores of the pre-test and post-test are computed and analyzed with the software of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS)17.0. The pre-course survey questionnaire and the post-course survey questionnaire are the same.The qualitative research is two interviews with experimental students,one made before the experiment, the other made after the experiment. The author makes statistics and analysis about all the data with SPSS 17.0. After making comparisons of all the data between the two classes, the author comes to the conclusion that PBA is feasible and effective in professional English teaching in HVC. At last, the authors states the major findings and limitations of the study.Not only is PBA popularly used in the teaching of engineering courses, it can also be used in the teaching of professional English and produce satisfactory teaching effect. PBA presents the advantages of constructivism, the cooperative learning approach and the inquiry with its attention to language knowledge and practical skills. PBA is job-oriented, which arouse students'great interest, thus their communicative ability enhance, cooperative ability improved, professional skills promoted and confidence boosted. There are also limitations. The objects of the research are students from Rizhao Polytechnic solely, not from vocational colleges, which is not completely random. The questions of questionnaires and interviews are more or less problematic. The experiment was conducted only for 4 months; hence the limit of the time of the experiment also tends to lead to a misunderstanding of the long-term effect of PBA in professional English teaching. Due to the author's busy work, there isn't sufficient time to search for more research materials, which may restrict the study to some extent. The paper provides suggestions or clues for the future professional English teaching and supplement the study of applying PBA to other fields of language teaching as well as improve further exploration of such topic in academic field both at home and abroad.