An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Information-Gap Tasks On Oral English Teaching Effectiveness In Vocational Colleges

Vocational college English teaching is oriented to cultivate students’ practicalEnglish application capacity and to highlight the practicability and pertinence of theteaching material. To improve students’ overall English communicative competence,the oral English teaching is a key part. However, things so far in vocational Englishteaching are not going well. The reasons are diverse. Generally speaking, for onething, in addition to vocational students’ relatively low English proficiency and lackof interest in learning English, oral English teaching does not receive due attentionthroughout primary and middle schools. For the other, the teaching of language formsinstead of practical application still dominates the English class nowadays in mostvocational English classrooms, which directly results in the phenomenon that studentsrefuse to open their mouth to speak English and to actively get themselves involved inclass activities. Therefore, it remains a significant task to improve the oral Englishteaching quality in vocational English classes.For the sake of this task, this thesis seeks to improve students’ oral Englishproficiency in vocational colleges by designing learning tasks in light of the principleof Information Gap. Information Gap, as a key principle in Communicative LanguageTeaching, refers to “the gap of information held by different people”. And it is thisgap that ensures the necessity for people to transfer information and communicatewith each other. Through communication, the gap of information is narrowed or evenfilled, a balance of information is reached, and the goal of communication is achieved.It is supposed that the incorporation of the Information Gap principle into collegeEnglish teaching can serve the oral English teaching practice satisfactorily andimprove students’ oral English proficiency sufficiently. Yet, a probe into the masters’and doctoral dissertations database on CNKI shows that only9of them are concernedwith Information Gap and English teaching, among which no one is on vocationalEnglish teaching. Therefore, this thesis strives to conduct an empirical study on theeffectiveness that the Information Gap principle takes to the improvement of vocational students’ oral English proficiency, hoping to fill the vacancy and providesome references for vocational oral English teaching.Taking two classes of non-English major students who entered Shandong YingcaiUniversity in2012as participants, the present study conducts an empirical study ofthe effectiveness and feasibility of the Information Gap principle on improvingvocational college students’ oral English proficiency. A totality of90students wasrandomly distributed to two classes: the experimental class and the control class. Theexperimental class learns spoken English under the guidance ofInformation-Gap-based teaching method while the control class learns in the contextof traditional teaching method. Through one semester of study, which includestheoretical argument, questionnaires, pre-tests and post-tests, interviews and classobservations, the author finds from the quantitative and qualitative analysis of thecollected data that English teaching based on the Information Gap principle couldobviously improve the students’ oral English fluency and grammatical accuracy,satisfactorily enhance their oral language proficiency. Besides, students’ motivation tolearn the language could also be greatly promoted.With the backup of several related language teaching theories, the empiricalstudy in light of the Information Gap principle theoretically verifies the effectivenessand feasibility of IG-based teaching method on improving vocational college students’oral English proficiency. Moreover, it turns out that Information Gap principle couldsatisfactorily serve the vocational college spoken English teaching, which is inaccordance with the status quo and requirements of vocational college oral Englishteaching and well interprets the orientation of vocational education as expected.