The Investigation Of English Visual-audio-oral Teaching Methods Based On Constructivism

The multimedia English visual-audio-oral teaching (MEVAOT) in ordinary colleges has its own distinctive features. This paper, based on constructivism, studies the MEVAOT practice in one of those colleges, Leshan Teachers College, through a questionnaire survey, interviews and classroom observations, thereby putting forward some suggestions of teaching approaches and strategies on the preparation for teacher's part and the tasks for students' part.It is what we teachers should do that are to choose appropriate topic-related visual-audio-oral materials form books and via internet, and to make efficient task-based multimedia teaching materials or courseware according to different learning environment, teaching objectives and approaches employed in class. Hence, the instructor needs to develop appropriate teaching aims, suitable teaching approaches and choose teaching materials creatively. Besides, the principles of execution courseware mentioned to help the instructors' exploitation of high-quality courseware.After class, the students review the pronunciation, spelling and meanings of the important and difficult words, idioms, expressions, patterns and collocations by themselves or in pairs or groups. They carry out many kinds of language activities such as the topic reviewing, further reading, discussing and exchanging ideas with others. This paper is organized in five chapters including the introduction. The literature review in chapter two gives an overall and comprehensive introduction to and comment on the present study results, involving previous studies on English listening and speaking teaching, multimedia visual-audio-oral teaching. Chapter three, in which the author discusses the problems found in the questionnaire, interviews and classroom observations, aims at finding out the factors affecting the speaking and listening training in Chinese college English classroom. What's more, this chapter still illustrates the applied theories referred to in this paper. According to the problems found in the investigation, constructivism is illustrated as the applied theories referred to in chapter 4, including the history of constructivism, the explanation of constructivism, the benefits of constructivism and the introduction of task-based approach to English listening and speaking. The fifth part focuses on the suggestions of the English speaking and listening training in the second-class colleges in the Southwest of China in the light of the findings from the investigation based on constructivism. The suggestions consist of several aspects such as, the creation of teaching aims, the teaching approaches based on the teaching aims and constructivism, the assessment and use of task-based listening and speaking teaching materials, the development and evaluation of courseware and the roles of students and teachers in ELST practice, etc. Finally, the conclusion gives a summary of the whole thesis including the limitations of this paper and the hints for future studies in this field.Based on the theories of constructivism, the author focuses on finding out some teaching strategies and approaches to solving these problems. These teaching approaches are supposed to enable non-English majors to construct their own knowledge systems and improve their English listening and speaking abilities in the learning process. The study provides a new perspective for the college English reform in the second-class colleges and has practical significance for training English talents.