On The Application Of Problem-based Learning In College Oral English Teaching

With the development of the informatization and globalization, people’s life and learning style have been greatly changed. This transformation puts forward a much higher standard for English talents as well as college English education. The ultimate aim of foreign language teaching is to cultivate learners’ communicative competence. Since the1990s, problem-based learning has been introduced to foreign language teaching and it is highly evaluated by Language teachers. The problem-based learning provides complex, ill-structured and open-ended problems to the learners who are divided into small groups and work collaboratively to solve the problem, and thus improves the learners’autonomous learning and problem solving skills.The thesis is to study the effectiveness of PBL in college oral English class based on the theory of Second language acquisition and constructivism. According to constructivism, language learners do not acquire knowledge by reciting grammatical rules; instead, they get the acquisition of language from the practice of language in real life activities. The language learners construct new knowledge by employing their knowledge to the solution of real life problems. Concerning the research, there are two research questions:Question1. How does PBL affect the students’oral English competence?Question2. How does PBL affect students’learning initiative toward oral English learning?In this experiment, the quantitative and qualitative research and applied. The quantitative research includes tests of the students’ oral English competence and the questionnaires, and the students’ interview was conducted as the qualitative research. Two classes of students in Anhui Science and Technology University participated in the oral English test before the experiment. The result indicated that the oral competence in the two classes were at the same level. Thus, the author took the two classes as the control class and the experimental class respectively. The experimental class consists of86students and the control class83students. Post-test was also conducted at the end of the experiment, and the data was collected and analyzed by SPSS17.0. The two test papers were all taken from the Real Communication, Listening and Speaking, New Standard College English, Book1, published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Before and after the experiment, questionnaires were conducted among the students in the experimental class, and20of them are interviewed to get more feedbacks of the experiment. According to the data from the tests, questionnaires and participants’ feedbacks on PBL, we can derive the following conclusions:1. the application of PBL in oral English course improves students’oral English competence.2. PBL improves students’ learning interest, stimulates their learning autonomy, relieves students’ anxiety and improves their confidence in oral English learning.This thesis consists of five chapters. In Chapter One, the general introduction of the whole study is made. It covers four sections, including the background of the study, necessity and significance of the study, and the objectives of the study comes last. Chapter Two is the literature review of the study. Chapter Three elaborates the details of the experiment while Chapter Four presents and discusses the statistical results of the experiment. Chapter Five makes a conclusion and provides the major findings and implications of the study. Limitations and suggestions for the research are also presented in this chapter.The result of the experiment indicates that PBL plays a positive effect in college oral English teaching and in improving students’ oral competence and their initiative in oral English learning.