A Study On The Application Of Project-based Learning In Business English Negotiation

Business English Negotiation, as a compulsory course for business English majors,has received more and more attention in Chinese universities. In recent years, there aremany kinds of teaching materials about international business negotiation. However, theteaching mode of international business negotiation still follows the traditional teachingmode that teachers mainly explain knowledge to the students and students take notes.This teaching mode largely suppresses students’ learning initiative andself-consciousness and affects students’ comprehensive ability of using language,cooperative learning ability and social practice ability. There are a lot of researchesabout the current state or the reform of international business negotiation teaching, butthe discussion about the teaching mode especially the systematic and in-depthapplication research is limited. Therefore, the author proposes that it is necessary toexplore more new effective and appropriate teaching methods of such course in order tocultivate students’ abilities and realize their all-round development.Project-based Learning (PBL) is an instructional and student-centered, which isused to integrate students’ language skills through a series of project activities. Manyexperts and scholars have done many researches on the features, theoretical foundationand application of the PBL mode. All those researches show that PBL can developstudent’s language skills, professional knowledge and improve learners’ comprehensivelanguage ability, autonomous learning ability, cooperative learning and social practiceability. The author tries to apply PBL into business English negotiation course with thepurpose to explore a more effective method for business English negotiation course.Based on PBL, the author designs one of the units in English for business negotiationcourse aiming to study how to apply PBL into the specific unit in business Englishnegotiation course and finally achieve better teaching effect.Based on PBL teaching mode, this paper presents a teaching design. The authortakes unit six---At the Negotiation2On Price---as a sample lesson from the bookEnglish for Business Negotiation. The purpose of this research is to display how PBL isimplemented in Business English Negotiation teaching. The content of the designconsists of learners’ analysis, teaching contents analysis, teaching objectives analysis,teaching resource design, project design, learning activity design, teaching evaluationand reflection. The sample lesson is designed mainly based on learning activity design. The sample lesson is made up of five stages, including project preparation, projectselection, project exploration and works production, results display and teachingreflection. The paper is to provide functional and operational teaching mode forBusiness English Negotiation.