Application Of Inquiry-based Learning In Vocational College English Vocabulary Teaching

The reception learning approach is adopted in the conventional English teaching.Teachers play a dominant role and students merely accept knowledge passively.Consequently,students not only lost their interest and initiative in English learning but also lacked the ability of finding,thinking,analyzing and solving problems.Inquiry-based learning,advocated in the “Development Plan Outline for Medium and Long Term Education Reform and Development”,attaches great importance to problem-solving,highlights autonomous inquiry,and aims to foster students' independent learning ability,spirit of inquiry and innovation.Inquiry-based learning conforms to the requirements of the new curriculum reform;therefore,it attracts extensive attention and is strongly advocated by the educators in our country.All the colleges and universities highly value English teaching.Improving vocabulary teaching is the prerequisite and foundation to improve English teaching.However,the current problems in English teaching are time-consuming and inefficient,and how to solve this problem is the key to improving the quality of English teaching.Therefore,it is high time that we strengthened vocabulary teaching and explored an effective and scientific learning model.This thesis applies inquiry-based learning in English vocabulary teaching in vocational college,which meets the requirements of the times and the current situation of vocational English vocabulary teaching.Inquiry-based learning provides the students with more opportunities of independent learning and cooperative inquiry,which contributes to the improvement of students' comprehensive capacity and makes students put their knowledge into practical use.Inquiry-based learning changes the traditional “teacher-centered” teaching mode.In the inquiry process,students become the main body of learning activities,and the teacher transforms into anorganizer,a facilitator and a participant.The study applies inquiry-based learning in vocational college English vocabulary teaching,and discusses the feasibility and effectiveness of inquiry-based learning on levels of both theory and practice.The study chooses 60 art design major freshmen from Vocational College in Qingdao Technological University as the subjects,all of which are divided into the experimental class and the control class.Students in the experiment class were instructed through inquiry-based learning model while students in the control class were lectured in the traditional approach.With the help of the SPSS in data analysis,the results show that inquiry-based learning is feasible and effective in vocabulary teaching.Limited to a number of factors,of course,there are also lots of deficiencies in the study.The thesis has put forward some suggestions of applying inquiry-based learning to vocabulary teaching,hoping to solve the problems existing in English vocabulary learning in vocational college,and hopefully this thesis will provide valuable reference for the future English teaching.