Application Of Case Method Via Internet To Intercultural Business Communication Course

Case method is an approach of teaching based on the case. Teacher plays the role ofdesigner and inspirator, and encourages students to actively participate in discussions,which makes it become special and different from other teaching methods. With the adventof the internet age, internet has played an unprecedented important part in all walks of life,which considerably promotes the educational reform and the innovation of teachingmethod and mechanism. Case method via Internet,(abbreviated as CMVI hereafter) withthe use of internet information platform and teaching software, supplies a new choice forteacher and students to communicate interactively.Intercultural Business Communication serves as a basic course for the BusinessEnglish majors. It is of critical importance in widening students’ international interactiveawareness and enhancing their intercultural communicative competence.“Interculturalcommunicative competence is comprehensively composed of verbal proficiency,non-verbal proficiency, intercultural understanding capability, intercultural adaptiveperformance”, noted Bi Jiwan (1998:12). In view of such features of the course ascross-disciplinarity, inclusiveness, humanity, practicality and diversity, it’s not enough tocultivate the qualified talents by the teacher-oriented way of theory teaching. The author isconvinced that case method will find its due place in the course of Intercultural BusinessCommunication.Under the guidance of Constructivism represented by Vygotsky and Piaget and“Anchored Instruction Theory” by John Bransford, the thesis analyzes the application ofCase Method via Internet into the course of Intercultural Business Communication. First,the achievements of practice and theories on case method home and abroad are reviewed,on the basis of which the teaching model of CMVI is attentively put forward. Then, theauthor conducts a quantitative empirical research among the students with Business English Orientation of the English major in Jining University of Shandong Province inorder to find out how much influence on students’ learning interest, English proficiency,ability of critical thinking, decision-making, innovation and collaboration when theteaching model of CMVI is applied into IBC course. Furthermore, it’s necessary to figureout the extent to which the influence on teacher’s ability of thinking and interpersonalcommunication will be. Class one and class four, together with seventy students, israndomly classified into experimental group and class two and class three, with the numberof seventy, as control group. In the process of experiment, the teaching model of CMVI isapplied into the experimental group and the traditional teacher-oriented teaching method isadopted in the control group. Three research instruments of test, questionnaire andinterview are applied in the term-long follow-up study. The study concludes that CMVI iseffectively applicable in the course of Intercultural Business Communication. The attitudeof students changed from passive learning to active learning. The motivation of learningbecomes stronger. They felt much more interests in IBC course and dare to talk in English,unafraid of making mistakes. When confronted with difficult questions, they couldcombine the theory with practice and deal with the issues comprehensively and thoroughly.After that decision is to be made. The thesis ends up with the author’s summary of thestrengths and drawbacks of the CMVI together with recommendations for future study inthe expectation that some contribution is made for the research of this field.