Implicit Grouping Instruction Of Spoken English In Higher Vocational Schools

With the increasing strengthening of globalization trend, internationalcommunication is becoming more and more frequent. Meanwhile, the role of English,which serves as an international Lingua Franca, is also getting more and moreimportant in our daily life and professional settings. Therefore, our society putforward higher requirement for employees’ spoken-English competence. In five-yearsystem higher vocational schools which are employment-orientated, improvingstudents’ oral English competence has certainly become the top priority of Englishteaching.However, students’ spoken English level in five-year system higher vocationalschools is not optimistic at present. The students enrolled in higher vocational schoolsmostly fail to enroll into ordinary senior high schools after participating in the SeniorHigh School Entrance Examination. There are big disparities among the students intheir English language competence and generally they are quite weak in oral English.Moreover, the traditional Large Class Teaching Mode emphasized the teachingprinciples of uniformity and keeping in step, which ignored students’ individualdifferences. As a result, teaching spoken English in higher vocational schools got intoan awkward situation, in which not only the excellent students couldn’t make anyprogress, but also the underachievers became worse in their study. In order to changethis situation, the author attempts to apply implicit grouping instruction to oralEnglish teaching in her higher vocational school, which aims to explore a teachingmode adapting to students’ individual differences, for the purpose of stimulatingstudents’ learning initiative and improving their oral English level.This research is built on the basis of several theories, such as the Zone ofProximal Development, Mastery Learning, Humanism, Input Hypothesis, and thePrinciple of Teaching Students in Accordance with Their Aptitude. The authorconducted a research on adopting implicit grouping instruction to oral Englishteaching in Class1118of the Department of Automation Engineering in WuxiMachinery and Electron Higher Professional and Technical School. The class consists of44students and the research lasted four months. According to students’ practicallevel, the author carried out grouping instruction on teaching objects, teachingobjectives, teaching content, teaching strategies, teaching evaluation, etc., withoutinforming the students of the experiments. At the same time, Class1114of43students was selected as the control class. The author applied traditional teachingapproach to spoken English teaching in this class. In this paper, the author mainlyadopted experimental and questionnaire research. And the students from both theexperimental class and the control class were requested to take part in an Oral EnglishProficiency Test respectively before and after the experiment. Besides, a questionnairesurvey was conducted to know about students’ spoken English learning from theexperimental class before and after they were grouped.After analyzing the experiment results, the author drew the following conclusions:Implicit Grouping Instruction can improve students’ spoken English level in a largescale. It is obvious that the teaching method also has a positive effect on oral Englishlearning strategy and emotional attitude. After the experiment, students’ learningattitudes toward spoken English became more positive, and they took part inclassroom activities more actively. In the meantime, the author also mentioned someproblems and puzzles met in the process of conducting Implicit Grouping Instruction,hoping to communicate and discuss them with peers and experts so as to improve herown teaching level further.