Designing A System Of Content And Methods For The Teaching Of EFL To Sports School Learners

In contemporary vocational school EFL teaching,teachers are increasingly more often selecting content and methods of instruction according to students' professional fields so as to improve the students' learning,but they often accomplish this though intuition or experience rather than rational methods and frequently fail to arrive at an appropriate system of content and methods of instruction.Meanwhile,in vocational school EFL teaching research,scholars have made various fruitful studies on the selection of teaching content and methods,but they often suffer from a lack of systemicity in their philosophical guidelines,theoretical bases,methods and procedures.In view of the above situation of vocational school EFL teaching and research,the present study first formulates a system of content and methods for the teaching of EFL to sports school learners in the light of dialectical systemic thinking,on the basis of Robert Gardener and others' Motivation Theory,Constructivist and Behaviorist Learning Theories,Stephen Krashen's “Input Hypothesis”,Michael Long's “Interactive Hypothesis” and other relevant psychological and language learning theories,and mainly through the method and procedure of theoretical deduction.The designed system of teaching content mainly comprises core EFL knowledge and skills plus EFL knowledge and skills most relevant to or most probably used by sports school EFL learners(especially phonological,grammatical,lexical and cultural knowledge and skills of listening,reading,speaking,writing and translating involving content of the sports and neighboring fields).The proposed system of instruction methods includes a systemic meta-method for managing the methods themselves plus a continuum of methods emphasizing learner-centeredness(e.g.Communicative or Task-based Language Teaching),methods allowing for learner-teacher interaction(e.g.Eclectic Approach),and methods stressing teacher-or environment-centeredness(e.g.Audio-lingual Method).After its formulation,the present study verifies the effects of the system of sports school EFL teaching content and methods on improving thestudents' learning confidence,interest,motivation,learning efficiency and learning outcomes,with 68 students from a swimming sports school as subjects,and through an integrated methodology of quasi-experiment which combines quantitative with qualitative measures(questionnaire,interview,pre-test and post-test as data collection instruments).Results generated from the study reveal that the formulated system of sports school EFL teaching content and methods can effectively enhance(1)the students' learning confidence,interest and motivation and(2)their learning efficiency and outcomes.This study may hopefully have both practical and academic significance.In terms of its practical value,the results of the study may help to solve the problem of inadequate systemicness in the vocational school teachers' selection of EFL teaching content and methods.In terms of its theoretical implication,the methodology of the study may help to solve the problem of inadequate systemicness in the guidelines,theoretical bases,methods,and procedures of vocational school EFL teaching content and method research.