Studies On Teaching Spoken English In Vocational School Within The Framework Of Needs Theory

Students in secondary vocational schools will serve various enterprises right after their graduation.A good command of English guarantees their smooth integration into the workplace and career in the future.However,affected by the limitation of teaching materials and weak foundation of their English proficiency,most of the secondary vocational students lose their interest and motivation in learning English,especially in spoken English.Therefore,this study first makes a questionnaire,attempting to investigate the needs of secondary vocational students in spoken English class.Accordingly,the cooperative learning model is adopted in spoken English class in order to meet their needs.Students in Class 1501 and Class 1502,who are Secretary(foreign)majors in Modern Vocational and Technical School,were selected to be the subjects of this study.According to the results from the questionnaire,data of learning motivation show that students learn spoken English mainly to meet the job requirements in the future as well as pass the final exams.Data of teaching arrangements in spoken English class also show that students expect to focus on the learning strategies in spoken English and coherent discourse.Besides,students in secondary vocational schools prefer classroom activities based on interpersonal interaction to highlight the learner's subjectivity.Based on the data collected from the results of needs analyses and combined with the observation of everyday teaching,this study attempts to find out whether the cooperative learning approach will affect the spoken English achievements and spoken language learning strategies of secondary vocational students.In 17 weeks' teaching experiment,Secretarial(foreign)1501 class was selected as the experimental class,and Secretary(foreign)1502 class was selected as the control class.In the experimental class,the cooperative learning teaching experiment based on Need Theory was carried out during the whole process,while traditional 3P model was used in the control class for spoken English learning.In the research methods,SPSS21.0 software was used to analyze the spoken test results of two classes;Excel software was used to analyze the data of oral English learningstrategies in experimental class before and after the experiment.This study has come to the conclusions as follows: 1)The cooperative learning model,which meets the needs of learning,can effectively improve the spoken English achievements of secondary vocational students,especially in the field of interactive communication competence and text coherence competence.2)It can improve and enhance the students' spoken learning strategies,e.g.more students can develop a positive attitude towards spoken English learning and set appropriate learning goals for themselves;students are increasingly initiative to preview and review assignments for their study.In other words,in the secondary vocational English speaking class,cooperative learning can meet the needs of students in spoken English learning process.However,due to the time limitation of study period,the imbalance of sex ratio in study sample as well as the weakness of the author's own theoretical knowledge,there are still more space for further improvement.It is hoped that the results of this study can provide references for the future study of spoken English teaching in secondary vocational schools.