The Application Of Evidence-based Education In College English Teaching

The philosophy of evidence-based practice originated from evidence-based medicinethat had quickly become the most important model in clinical decision-making, and then theidea was widely advocated and adopted in more other fields, not only in public health fieldslike nursing and pharmacy, but also in the fields of professional activity, such as managementand especially education and so on.In the recent decade, evidence-based education, a new teaching method, has come toprominence in educational field, especially in college English teaching, in many westerncountries, which requires the teachers to integrate individual expertise and experience with thebest existing evidence gained from educational research to make the feasible decision, therebymeeting the students’ learning needs. Lots of educators claim that teaching should be anevidence-based profession and education should become an evidence-based practice. But inChina, it is still in the early stages.In order to prove the hypothesis that students in evidence-based education classroomsperformed better than those in traditional teaching methods classrooms, an empirical studywas conducted on the basis of two alternative designs, tests and interview, for one semester(2013.09—2014.01). The subjects of the study were non-English-major freshmen from twoparallel classes of liberal arts of Shanxi Datong University, one of which was chosen as theexperimental class randomly by lot, where evidence-based education was applied, and the restwas treated as controlled class, in which traditional teaching methods were implemented. Theaim of tests in this study was to identify whether evidence-based education was able to have apositive effect on the college English teaching, compared with the traditional teachingmethods, and interview, an excellent complement to tests, was used to explore the students’attitudes towards this new teaching approach further. All the data gathered from tests wasanalyzed by the author with the help of software SPSS, Version11.5, and from the answers to interview questions the conclusion could be generalized through the analytic method ofthematic correspondence. In the end, the hypothesis was proved to be tenable throughquantitative and qualitative analyses that students from experimental class achieved more thanthose from controlled class, and the conclusion could be drawn that compared with traditionalteaching models, evidence-based education did have an important influence on the students’achievements and was worth spreading in educational field, especially in college Englishteaching.