An Empirical Study Of CBI In EST Teaching

In March2000, the Ministry of Education issued "English Major Teaching Syllabus for Higher Education", which pointed out:" The training goal of English majors for higher education is to cultivate inter-disciplinary talents who possess a solid English language foundation, a broad range of cultural knowledge and proficient use of English in foreign affairs, education, economy, culture, technology, military affairs and other departments engaged in the translation, education, management and research work." To meet the requirement of the inter-disciplinary talents in the rapid developing society, foreign language teaching focus has gradually shifted from a simple language teaching to a combination of language and content teaching model, which is referred to as Content-based Instruction (CBI). Under this mode, the focus of learning is to obtain information through the second language learning in the process of language skills development.EST teaching, inter-disciplinary and comprehensive, cultivates EST talents as their goal. EST course aims to further consolidate and improve their English ability, especially to improve the EST reading ability and to train students’ability to read EST articles. Thus, the writer attempted to apply CBI into EST teaching in order to testify (1) CBI can motivate the students’intrinsic interests towards EST learning;(2) CBI can improve either the students’ four traditional language skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing or the professional knowledge of EST.The writer carried out the experiment in Development College of Jilin Agricultural University. These60students were grouped into experiment class made up of30students and control class made up of30students by means of stratified sampling. The researchers first divided these60students into groups of same characteristics, such as their English level, gender, hometown, and so on. Thus, in each class, there are4boys and26girls;2boys and18girls in each class have passed TEM-4, whereas2boys and8girls didn’t pass TEM-4; In each class15students are from the north, and the rest15are from the south. This method of grouping is to guarantee the reliability and validity of the research. This experiment has been carried out for two months employing questionnaires, classroom observation, interview and tests. The result is quite satisfactory, which proved that CBI is an effective way to combine the language skills with the professional knowledge and also put forward some suggestions on EST teaching.For some subjective and objective reasons, there must be some shortcomings of this research. The writer will continue to perfect it in the following study and research.