A Study On English Teaching Reform For Non-English Majors In Higher Vocational-technical Colleges Based On Needs Analysis

English course in HVTC as a compulsory course is geared to different requirements of English teaching for every non-English major student with different majors. But the fact is that all the students in HVTC share same teaching materials in many cases, which totally disregards different professional English requirements. The existing teaching modes in HVTC mostly follow academic higher education or high school teaching modes which can’t reach the goal of making students study for the purpose of application in their future job. Meanwhile, it can’t meet the social demands of English skills and qualities of high technicians. It shows the necessity and urgency of carrying out higher vocational English teaching reform in HVTC.Needs analysis began to be employed in language teaching from the 1960s and flourish since the 1980s (Brindley,1984). Over the past three decades, Chinese scholars have paid great efforts to explore suitable models of needs analysis in foreign language teaching mostly for English majors (Chen Bingbing,2010). However, relevant researches on non-English majors in HVTC have hardly been involved in. This paper studies needs on English learning of non-English major students (higher vocational English namely) in HVTC in the hope that it can provide data support and supplementary to the language teaching in China.Any one source of information is likely to be incomplete or partial, a triangular approach (collecting information from two or more sources) is advisable when needs analysis is conducted (J.C. Richards,2001). In order to establish validity in this study, needs analysis is conducted by triangulating multiple sources:students in HVTC, graduates and employers (in the form of questionnaire) and teachers (interview). The investigations in this study are given to 300 non-English majors (150 science students and 150 liberal art students) and 100 graduates from six specialties in HVTC of Guangdong University of Science and Technology (GDUST) and 33 employers from enterprises in Guangdong province as well. In addition,10 English teachers are interviewed as a supplementary to the three questionnaires. This study attempts to answer the following questions:What are their English learning needs of students, graduates in HVTC?What is the gap between English ability the students have and English ability the employers have required?In what way can higher vocational English teaching reform satisfy both the learners’needs and social demands?After obtaining and analyzing the data, the findings indicate that students from different specialties have different English learning needs. And social requirements to graduates’English skills vary according to professions, jobs and positions. This implies higher vocational English teaching must take different professional English requirements into account and combine closely with students’ professions. In this context, the author proposes English teaching reform in HVTC from four aspects: multi-dimensional teaching objectives, perspective teaching materials, school-enterprise cooperation model and comprehensive assessment. The reform aims at improving English teaching in HVTC and satisfying both learners’ needs and social demands. But as a tentative and small-scale research, there are limitations in this study:Not quite satisfactory validity arising from the relatively small sample size and from subjects with local characteristics. Besides, the high requirements of faculty and resources in school-enterprise teaching mode are great challenge to HVTC. And at last, some suggestions on further study are proposed.