Research On The Project-based Public English Program In A Higher Vocational College

In the past10years, the Higher Vocational Education (HVE) has become an important force to enhance Chinese higher education due to its features in the orientation and goals. The objective of HVE public English (PE) aims to improve students’communicative competence. However, as an isolated public course, the traditional teaching approach and content of PE have not been effectively combined with students’future careers. As a result, it is hard for the graduates to meet actual needs of the job market. Therefore, how to carry out the reform of PE to help students build a solid foundation for English language learning and improve their communicative competence is a new topic of recent research in HVE PE teaching.Project-based learning (PBL) is a systematic teaching mode that engages students in learning essential knowledge and practical skills through conducting carefully designed products. It originated in vocational education of European architecture schools in the16th century and subsequently became popular in the primary and secondary schools in America and Europe. The Chinese higher education began to adopt PBL in the late1980s but the practice mostly concentrated on engineering. The research on the application of PBL in the field of PE teaching especially in HVE was neglected. For the above reasons, the present research addressed the following three questions:1. Is PBL feasible in improving students’academic performance?2. Does PBL have a positive influence on students’practical abilities?3. Can PBL enhance students’professional qualities?The research aimed at applying PBL in PE of HVE and probed into the influence PBL on students’academic performance, practical abilities and professional qualities. It tried to broaden teachers and students’understanding of the significance of PBL, to constitute the optimal mode of PE language teaching. The80subjects were all from Anhui Broadcasting Vocational college, including40students in Class42(the experimental class) and40students in class43(the control class), Grade1from Management department. The instruments used in this study included tests, questionnaire survey and interviews. Statistical tool SPSS19.0was used to deal with relevant data. Before the experiment, a pre-test was conducted both in the experimental class (EC) and the control class (CC). The scores showed that there was no statistic significance between the two classes. During the experiment, EC was taught in PBL while CC was taught in traditional teaching method. A post-test was conducted in EC and CC and the results were used to find out influences PBL had on students’academic performance. Questionnaires were administered after the experiment in EC to explain the effects on students’practical abilities and professional qualities. Interviews were done after each project to learn about the feedback of students and teachers. The major findings of the study were as follows: firstly, both traditional teaching method and PBL could improve students’test scores, but the progress of which EC has got was higher than that of CC. Therefore, PBL was feasible in improving students’academic performance. Secondly, PBL combined theoretical knowledge with practice and the language competence of students in EC has promoted. It indicated that PBL had a positive influence on students’practical abilities. Lastly, PBL strengthened professional qualities of students in EC. Students’ creation ability, communication ability and collaboration ability were all trained.The researcher also found that PBL could greatly activate the class atmosphere and stimulate students’enthusiasm in learning English but their extrinsic motivation for English learning was stronger than their intrinsic motivation. Students still were lack of evaluation and self-evaluation abilities. Due to the limited time and conditions of the experiment, other problems of PBL were found out and they were waiting for further research and exploration. The findings of the present study made contributions for a lager scale of application of PBL and provided practical guidance in PE of HVE.