An Empirical Study On The Effect Of CBI On Oral English Output Of The Flight Attendants Majors

Nowadays, the requirement from the society on college students’ English listening and speaking abilities have become more challenging. But at present, oral English teaching at college is generally done through explanation and demonstration and the materials used by the students have not been targeted to students’ majors. In addition, students, especially non-English majors, do not pay much attention to their English language speaking abilities and just can not express themselves freely and effectively in English. How to improve the non-English majors’ oral English has become an important subject in English language education research field.CBI teaching model was first proposed in Canada as early as 1960 s. It is a method of foreign language teaching based on contents, a kind of teaching method focusing on language teaching based on subject content teaching in order to gain foreign language acquisition. The application of such concept in oral English teaching provides a new idea for the research on oral English teaching.In this study, 30 college students majoring in Flight Attendants became my research subjects. The teaching material used is Oral English Course for Civil Aviation. The purpose is to discover the qualitative change of oral English output and quantitative change of oral English output among these non-English majors under CBI mode. This thesis first gives the definition of CBI mode and has an overview of related domestic and international research. Three kinds of research tools are applied, including “test”, “students’ self-evaluation sheets” and “teacher’s notes”. Through the analysis of the testing results from SPSS17.0 and the analysis and summary of “students’ self-evaluation sheets” and “teacher’s notes”, the research questions are answered.By paired samples T-test analysis of test results, it can be found that oral English output in qualitative changes were as follows: “pronunciation” and “intonation ”were significantly different in pre-/mid-test comparison, mid-/post-test comparison, and pre-/post-test comparison; “vocabulary” in three-group comparisons is significantly different; On the other hand, “grammar” in three-group comparisons is not significantly different; “Discourse management” and “interactive communication” were significantly different in pre-/mid-test comparison and mid-/post-test comparison, while, in the comparison of pre-test and post-test they were significant different. Oral English output in quantitive changes were as follows: “vocabulary quantities” and “sentence quantities” were significantly different in three comparisons. Analysis of “student self-evaluation sheets” and “teacher’ s notes” also draw the conclusion that students’ oral English output were improved in “pronunciation”, “intonation”, “vocabulary”, “discourse management”, “interactive communication”, “vocabulary quantities” and “sentence quantities”. However, no significant difference was found in “grammar”.There are some limitations in this study. For example, it is difficult to collect data of oral English output accurately during the test; the number of the research samples are small and the CBI teaching period is too short.