Application Of Experiential Teaching Approach To Vocational College Listening Teaching

Since1999, China has developed the higher vocational technology education. TheDepartment of Higher Education in Ministry of Education especially makes Basic Requirementsof Vocational College English Teaching, and clearly states that the aim of vocational collegeEnglish teaching is to cultivate the students’ practical ability of using language. It highlightspracticability and pertinence of teaching content. However, at present, students are still passivelisteners in class and have few opportunities to interact with the teacher and other students.Experiential teaching was put forward on the basis of John Dewey’s philosophy ofeducation and David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning. It emphasizes learner-centered, andencourages students to actively participate in the teaching situations and to experience theteaching activities by their own. From the middle and the end of last century, experientialteaching approach has been widely used in education at all levels, and has formed a relativelymature theory and practice system. This research aimed to apply the experiential teachingapproach into the listening teaching of vocational college, and tried to explore its practicalsignificance for the listening teaching.The participants involved in this research are non-English major sophomores from twoseparate classes (the size being50, respectively) of Electrical and Mechanical School, ShandongTrade Union College. All of the participants were instructed by the researcher and randomlyassigned to the Experimental Group (EG) and Control Group (CG). During one semester’sEnglish listening teaching, students in the Experimental Group received experiential teaching,while students in the Control Group still received the traditional teaching. SPSS19.0was used toanalyze the data collected from this research, including those from the pre-test, post-test,questionnaire and interview. Based on the data collection, a conclusion can be easily reached: theapplication of experiential teaching approach in the vocational college listening teaching didimprove students’ results of listening, motivated their interests and changed their attitudestowards English listening. In the end, the study is summarized by describing major findings, limitations andrecommendations for further research.