A Study On Effectiveness Of Applying Content-based Approach To Promoting Oral Communicative Competcncc

With the proliferation of international communication, professionals with a goodcommand of a foreign language are in increasingly great need to meet the demand ofeconomic and cultural communication in China. After some programs under content-basedapproach in North America and Europe had proved its remarkable effectiveness to broadenthe learners’ disciplinary knowledge, simultaneously strengthen the learners’ confidence,boost their motivation and finally promote learners’ comprehensive language proficiency(Dupuy2000; Krasper2000, Stryker&Leaver1989;1997), the concept of content-basedapproach began to draw the attention of linguists and EFL teachers in China two decades ago.Some scholars and EFL teachers began to do some exploration in this field with the urgentneed of cultivating talents competent both in subject area and language skills (Yu,2005).Some scholars have suggested adopting the teaching mode of infusing language with content/subject in Chinese College English (Lv,2001).The author randomly sampled38participants coming from non-English major in auniversity located in Liaoning province. The38participants were randomly divided into twoclasses and were given an IELTS test respectively before the experiment was conducted. After6weeks’ experiment with the treatment group instructed under the content-based approachand control group the regular approach, an IELTS test was given to test the discrepancy of thetwo groups in oral English. In addition, two questionnaires were sent to students in the controlgroup and the experimental group respectively after post-test to test the students’ attitude(such as interest, motivation&intention) toward content-based approach in language learningand traditional learning environment.From the quantitative analysis, the study got three results. Firstly, there was nosignificant difference between the control group and the experimental group in pre-test, whichmeant the English levels of the students in the control group and those in the experimentalgroups were the same. Secondly, the statistical result indicated that the average score of thecontrol group was somewhat higher than that of the experimental group after the treatment.Thirdly, the students in the control group improved faster and more obviously than those in the experimental group in post-test after six weeks. The quantitative results of the studyindicated that the students in experimental group did not outperform those in the controlgroup after receiving the treatment with the application of the content-based approach. Fromthe questionnaires, we could find out the students’ positive attitudes towards the content-basedapproach. They believed that the content-based approach could provide them with moreopportunities of oral English practice, equal participation and relaxing learning environment.From the experiment, it was very likely to conclude that the content-based approachcould not really play an important role in improving students’ English achievements in termsof oral English. Though the result of this quasi-experiment denied the positive function of thecontent-based approach in improving oral English because of limitations, to explore thepotential of the content-based approach in enhancing oral language is still worthexperimenting for those who are working in this domain considering some other successfulprograms in this field.