The Effects Of CBI On The English Development Of University Students

Content based instruction is organized around a topic or a subject matter thatstudents will acquire, involving total integration of language learning and subjectcontent learning. This teaching approach has already proved to be successful inforeign language teaching abroad. However, in Chinese EFL context, its developmentis still in infancy and relevant empirical studies are rarely found. Therefore, this studyaims to explore whether it is more effective than regular English class in China andtries to find out how content based instruction influences students’ Englishdevelopment, in hope of providing some implications for the applications of thisteaching approach in China.The freshmen of non-English majors in Shanghai Jiao Tong University areselected as the experimental group and control group. Among them, subjects fromJoint Institute receive content based instruction and form the experimental group,while those subjects from other schools make up the control group and attend regularEnglish class. In this study, both quantitative and qualitative analyses are applied. Onthe one hand, English proficiency test, vocabulary and writing tests are used as ameasurement for their English proficiency level, and the data are further analyzed bySPSS to see whether there is a significant difference between two groups in theirEnglish development. On the other hand, the questionnaire is employed to investigatehow content based instruction affects students’ English development.In the light of findings, subjects from the experimental group perform better thanthose in control group in the vocabulary test, revealing a significant differencebetween them. Of the writing test, there is no significant difference in terms ofsyntactic complexity and the experimental group performs better in lexical diversity.Thus, it is safe to say that compared with students who receive regular Englishteaching, students in content based instruction class generally acquire English at afaster rate. At the same time, most of the subjects surveyed in the questionnaireapplaud for this teaching method, believing that with the curriculum going on boththeir subject knowledge and language proficiency will be greatly improved.