A Study Of CBI Theme-based Oral English Teaching

With the development of globalization of China, a more modern educational system that prepares people to interact with global society is urgently needed. By contrast, oral English is often undeveloped for those non-English majors. A combination of potent inhibitors is responsible for this situation:large class size, traditional teaching method and time constraints. On the sufficient analysis of the limitations and requirements for college English teaching, this thesis argues for the importance of taking these factors into consideration and intends to resolve those in terms of CBI theme-based oral approach.Theme-based oral approach refers to teaching English in theme-based context on basis of group activities in the learner-centered classroom, aiming at promoting English learners’oral English proficiency. This thesis expounds CBI theme-based approach from the theoretical perspective of humanism, cooperative learning, communicative method and learner-centered teaching method. This new approach which changes the spoon-fed learning mode to active learning mode of college students aims to integrate class teaching and the self learning together. And it attempts to prove that this approach is efficient in oral English teaching for non-English majors, which integrates the meaningful classroom teaching of college teachers with autonomous learning from the students by means of group activities, and whether their learning motivation could be improved by this new approach. The aim of this study is to evaluate whether the students’ oral proficiency could be enhanced, and their confidence are strengthened. In this study the author tries to evaluate CBI theme-based approach through questionnaires, pretest, posttest, interviews and class observations for 92 students combining quantitative study and qualitative study and finds it effective to motivate the students to speak in public. All the data has been analyzed by SPSS(17.0).According to the survey and analysis, a majority of students have the positive attitudes towards this new teaching method. They confirm that this approach provides more opportunities to speak English, and arouse their motivation in learning English, improve the teaching efficiency and satisfy their learning needs. Thus, CBI theme-based is proved to be practical and useful in oral English teaching. And the study is realistic and practical in terms of method as well as its procedure and result. The author believes that this study will serves as a guideline or a menu for English teachers when they design a syllabus for their own class in oral English teaching. On the other hand, CBI theme-based oral approach may have its own limitations and thereby the author offers some suggestions for the future research.