On The Effectiveness Of MIT-based English Homework Design In Higher Vocational Colleges

As an organic part of the teaching process, homework is the important carrier of communications between teachers and students. However, under the influence of the traditional view on intelligences, several problems still exist in higher vocational colleges’(HVCs’) English homework design. Therefore, the majority of the students always complain about their English homework, and the effects of doing homework are not satisfactory.Given this, this study tries to apply the multiple intelligences theory (MIT) to English homework design in HVCs and hopes that it will be useful for improving the students’English-learning interest and multiple intelligences.MIT, put forward by Harward Gardner (1983), has changed the traditional view on intelligences which regards verbal-linguistic intelligence and logical-mathematical intelligence as the cores of human’s intelligence structures. This theory gives a new research orientation to us. However, though there are many researches on the effectiveness of MIT-based English teaching in classrooms, researches on the effectiveness of MIT-based English homework design are almost neglected.This study tries to probe into the effectiveness of MIT-based English homework design in HVCs. It tries to address the following two questions:1. Compared with the traditional English homework design, can MIT-based English homework design stimulate students’interest in English learning better?2. Compared with the traditional English homework design, can MIT-based English homework design improve students’multiple intelligences (MI) development better?An experiment (one term) is conducted in two parallel classes of Anhui Industry Polytechnic College:a control class (CC,54 non-English-major freshmen) and an experiment class (EC,52 non-English-major freshmen). Before the experiment, the students’English-learning interest and intelligence structures in the two classes were examined by questionnaires. During the experiment, students in CC had traditional English homework, while students in EC had MIT-based English homework. At the end of the experiment, post-questionnaires were conducted in each class, in order to explore if there were any disparities between them after the experiment and to explore if there were any disparities before and after the experiment in terms of CC and EC respectively; interviews and observations were carried out to investigate the experimental treatment’s effects on students’ English-learning interest and intelligence structures.SPSS 20.0 is adopted to analyze the results of pre-questionnaires and post-questionnaires by independent samples t-tests and paired samples t-tests.The major findings of the study are as follows:1. Compared with the traditional English homework design, MIT-based English homework design can contribute to the increase of the students’interest in English learning, especially to the increase of the out-class interest.2. Compared with the traditional English homework design, MIT-based English homework design has different effects on promoting students’ multiple intelligences development:it has significant influences on naturalist intelligence, but has no significant effects on the other seven intelligences.It is expected that this study can provide practical guidance for English teachers and researchers who are interested in this topic, so as to promote the development of the English teaching in HVCs.