The Effect Of The Multimedia-aided Situational Language Teaching On Students’ English Listening And Speaking At A Secondary Vocational School

As two of the most important English skills, listening and speaking have been considered as essential in the English language teaching worldwide. However, although communicative abilities based on listening and speaking have been given considerable attention in English teaching in China, the actual results are not quite satisfactory, and this problem is especially blatant in secondary vocational schools. Studies indicate that the lack of efficient teaching methods is one of the most significant reasons for the weakness of listening and speaking abilities among secondary vocational school students. Thus, how to teach listening and speaking English effectively and how to improve the communicative abilities of the students are questions that have been puzzling both teachers and students in secondary vocational schools.Over the years, situational approach has received more and more acceptance and there is also great applause to multimedia for its contribution in teaching. While situational approach and multimedia have been viewed helpful and progressive separately, the author intends to find out the influence they would have on English listening and speaking when they are combined. This study aims to investigate whether multimedia-aided situational approach is suitable for the cultivation of the listening and speaking abilities of the secondary vocational school students in China. Based mainly on constructivism and Krashen’s hypothesis of comprehensible input, and after analyzing the present situations of secondary vocational school English teaching and the characteristics and levels of the students in such schools, the researcher proposes to use multimedia-aided situational approach in the knowledge input and language output teaching, and tries to test the effectiveness and to find the final results through experiments. This research is carried out on students of civil aviation service major within a duration of one school term, and at the beginning and the end of the experiment, pre-tests and post-tests of the students’ listening and speaking abilities are taken, in addition to one questionnaire given to the students twice, and the result of the tests is analyzed using SPSS analyzing tool, in order to manifest the influence multimedia-aided situational approach would have on students’ English listening and speaking abilities.The research shows that multimedia-aided situational approach contributes greatly to the improving of students’ learning interest, easing up of classroom atmosphere, strengthening of the perception of situations, and the increasing of knowledge input, and the listening and speaking abilities of the students are significantly improved, and their desire to express and their confidence in their levels of English are greatly raised. Therefore, the relatively dull and stiff English teaching in secondary vocational schools is transformed into a livelier and more effective process with the help of multimedia-aided situational approach method.