Toward An Action-Oriented Systemic Approach To Secondary Vocational School EFL Teaching

With the contemporary growth and multiplication of approaches to EFL teaching,secondary vocational school EFL teaching has also adopted various approaches including the action-oriented approach,but is still suffering from the problem of inadequate systemicness in the understanding and application of teaching methods,especially in the treatment of the relationship between the Action-oriented Approach and other methods.Meanwhile,with the evolution of EFL teaching research methodology,the methodology in secondary vocational school EFL teaching research have also improved,but is still limited by the problem of inadequate systemicness in the guidelines,bases,methods,and procedures of research,especially by the overuse of empirical and quantitative rather than theoretical and qualitative methods.Oriented to the problem of inadequate systemicness in secondary vocational school EFL teaching practice and research,guided by dialectical systemic thinking salient in systems sciences,based on a combination of action-oriented teaching theories,constructivist learning theories,multiple intelligence theory,and other relevant theories,with reference to the EFL teaching in the Economic Trade Department of Yantai Industry and Trade Technicians’ College,and employing a deduction-based theoretical method and procedure,this study systemically explores the methods of secondary vocational school EFL teaching and formulates an Action-oriented Systemic Approach to secondary vocational school EFL teaching.This approach consists of a systemic meta-method and a system of EFL teaching methods including the Action-oriented Approach and other compatible approaches.Among them,the systemic meta-method is a method for systemically managing the system of methods of EFL teaching;the Action-oriented Approach is an EFL teaching method taking vocation-oriented EFL knowledge and skills as its teaching content,the students as active learners and actors,the teacher as director and organizer,student-teacher goal setting and learning and teacher-directed student learning as mode of teaching.Many other methods,such as the Communicative and Task-based Language Teaching,are supplementary to the Action-oriented Approach.After the Action-oriented Systemic Approach to secondary vocational school EFL teaching is formulated,the present study then verifies its effects on learning interest,autonomy and efficiency,using as participants 70 students majoring in accounting from the Economic Trade Department of Yantai Industry and Trade Technicians’ College,adopting a quasi-experiment involving both quantitative and qualitative analysis,and through such data collection procedures as interviews,questionnaire surveys and testing.Results of the empirical study demonstrate that the Action-oriented Systemic Approach to secondary vocational school EFL teaching can effectively improve(1)the students’ interest and motivation in EFL learning and their autonomous and cooperative EFL learning ability;and(2)the students’ competence in EFL use and their EFL learning efficiency or achievement.This study may hopefully possess both practical and theoretical importance.In terms of practice,the results of the study may help to solve the problem of inadequate systemicness in the understanding and application of teaching methods.In terms of theory,the methodology of the study may help to solve the problem of inadequate systemicness in the guidelines,theoretical bases,methods,and procedures of research.