An Action Research On Duty Report In English Teaching Of Vocational Education

The Basic Requirement for Vocational Education of English Teaching (trial version)(2000) states that, English teaching in vocational education aims at cultivating students’ practical language competence. In China, the students in vocational colleges are generally weak in English, especially in English speaking. Duty Report (DR) is a widely used method to cultivate and promote vocational college students’English speaking proficiency, but it was rather ineffective in the author’s class. In order to improve vocational students’English speaking ability, this thesis aims to probe whether continuity of DR can promote students’English speaking proficiency under the guidance of Action Research(AR).The author made a research among the50freshmen in the Department of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering in Hunan Communication Polytechnic(HCP), aiming at solving the following three problems:1) Is it necessary for us to adopt DR in the English teaching class?2) What factors are causing the ineffectiveness of DR?3) Could the continuity of DR improve vocational students’English speaking proficiency?A17weeks’AR was designed to direct and practice students under the guidance of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis. It is carried out in the following eight steps:1) problem identification2) hypothesis3) preliminary investigation4) restatement of the problem5) action plan6) fine tuning of the plan7) reporting the results8) reflection. Two questionnaires and two oral English tests were employed before and after the AR respectively and two interviews were conducted among and after the research. During the process of conducting the research, both the author and the students were required to write logs after each class. At last, both qualitative(interviews and logs) and quantitative analysis(questionnaires by SPSS13.0and oral English tests by calculating the percentage) would have been adopted in the thesis, based on the above collected data.The results of the research have proved that the author has solved the problem of ineffectiveness of DR in practice successfully. According to the reflection on the research, the author has realized that AR is an effective way to solve problems for teachers, to improve teaching ability as well as to promote teachers’professional development. Suggestions are also put forward for English teaching in the future.