The Application Of MOOC To ESP Teaching

With the coming of information age and economic globalization,the communication and cooperation in politics,economy,culture,and technology between China and other countries are becoming increasingly frequent and in the same time the need for cross-national and high-tech talents is urgent.It is necessary therefore for college students to master ESP in present international environment because it has the significant impact on their further study,job hunting and career.Compared with the EGP,ESP has clearer objectives,stronger pertinence and more practical values,the essence of which is to satisfy the diverse requirements of learners of different majors in order to enhance the students' language application ability and communicative skill,so the ESP should be the priority of present English teaching.But the actual conditions for students to gain ESP knowledge is limited especially in present Application-Based College due to some reasons such as ESP unqualified teaching teams,insufficient teaching resources,backward hardware facilities and so on.Fortunately from 2011 MOOC has launched an education storm which involves China quickly.This massive open online course,which has attracted millions of learners around world quickly from the day it occurred,offers an innovational learning platform to students and becomes popular because it's cheap,flexible,resourceful and easy to use.Most importantly,MOOC supplies the large number of high-quality courses with online supports,which ensures students to study according to individual requirements and preference.There is no doubt that MOOC brings the savior to ESP learners especially the students in Application-Based Colleges.On the basis of the previous study and present research,an experiment of application of MOOC to ESP is carried out.The purpose is to solve the ESP teaching problems in nowadays Application-Based College to find the effective method to promote the ESP teaching.In the process of research,the two natural classes of Grade 2015(sophomores)majoring in Public Affairs Administration are selected as the Experimental Class(EC)and the Controlled Class(CC),and the experimental instruction spans one term.Before the experiment,the CC and the EC are arranged to have a pre-test respectively,the result of which indicates that ESP level of two classes is equivalent.After the experiment,the CC and the EC are arranged to have a post-test respectively,the scores of which analyzed by SPSS objectively shows the effect of experiment teaching.Apart from the tests,a questionnaire and a semi-open interview are employed to gather further information about students' views of the experimental teaching.In conclusion the results of tests and other data processed by SPSS show the grade increase in the Experimental Class is slightly higher than that in the Controlled Class.It proves that the experimental teaching of applying MOOC to ESP is more effective than and superior to the traditional way in terms of motivating students' interest,supplying the rich learning resource,realizing students' domination of study schedule and improving listening and speaking ability.Therefore,MOOC can be properly applied to ESP teaching in Application-Based College.