An Investigation Of English Teaching In HVTC Based On Needs Analsis

English teaching design must follow the cognitive regulations, the regularities oflanguage learning, and the needs more overall consideration on professional nature and theneeds of the students, then accordingly determine the teaching objective, select and edit theteaching contents. The external orientation of the needs of the students is social formationsand the demand of workplaces, and the inner elements are the teaching experience, thelanguage rules and the educational principles. Internal and external conditions are compatiblewith each other and they are put in the implement of teaching. Generally speaking, the needsof the students can be established through interview, observation, questionnaire and othermeans. The needs analysis for designing the foreign language teaching was firstly used inEnglish for Specific Purposes (ESP) teaching, which is widely applied to English for GeneralPurposes (EGP) teaching design. Needs analysis is also a necessary step for foreign languageteaching design and classroom teaching assessments. Therefore, needs analysis has twofunctions for the foreign language teaching: one is a prerequisite to foreign languagecurriculum design, which provides the basis for the course design; the other is served as thereference standards of foreign language teaching evaluation, which guides the teaching to thetarget of the original design. In this research, a questionnaire is designed to invest the Englishneeds for higher vocational college students, by the analysis on course standards and thecurrent textbooks of higher vocational English teaching, and an empirical research accordingto the demand levels. The author of this thesis wants to establish evaluation and diagnosablecriteria to and improve the course design of vocational English and set up a basic idea andrules of class teaching in Higher Vocational Technical Colleges.This research designs a set of questionnaires for evaluating the demand analysis ofhigher vocational English courses, referring to the needs framework proposed byDudley-Evans and St John.Three hundred students, those who from six specialities, such as nursing, midwifery,pharmacy, logistics management, business administration and computer application, arerandomly selected for investigation and interview in Xiangtan Vocational and TechnicalCollege. After this, the statistical analysis on the survey and interview results is made, the results show that: the higher vocational English teaching in this college is far from thedesigned goal of course; there is a substantial gap between the higher vocational Englishcourses and student’s learning needs and the demand of workplaces; from the teaching contentand teaching program, teachers believe that the higher vocational students should firstimprove vocabulary and reading ability because they have less knowledge and poor basicability, and then train the listening and speaking abilities guided series of the workplace topics.However, in the study of needs analysis, the students hope to improve the ability tocommunicate in English centering on their own specialities or future workplaces. There is agreat distance between the teaching methods which HVTC English teachers have adopted andthe methods the students have expected. For the purpose of the students’ weak foundations inEnglish proficiency and skills, the teachers lay emphasis on improving their reading abilityand enlarging their vocabulary, and develop their communicative skills based on theirprofessional topics, ranked second. In the learning needs analysis, the students expect toimprove listening and oral abilities related to their specialities and future job. In the targetsituation analysis, different specialities should acquire different English skills. The specialitiesof nursing, midwifery and business administration should focus on both the reading andcommunicative abilities. While the specialities of pharmacy, logistics management andcomputer application should lay emphasize on the learners’ reading skill in order to select theindex and read related articles.From the investigation and analysis, this thesis proposes the college promotes accordingto the following reform measures in teaching.Firstly, we should design different series of workplace topic according to theprofessional characteristics and the needs of the students’ development in future work, set thesituations and train the students’ language skills centering on different topics in classroomteaching; Secondly, the college should invest funds to purchase and edit English literaturerelated to the specialities for students’ extracurricular reading yearly; Thirdly, the foreignlanguage teaching and research section should set up a research center for applied research onthe needs to be put into the practice classroom teaching and editing the teaching materials.