A Study Of Project-based Approach In Touirsm English Teaching Of Vocational Colleges

Tourism English is one of the core subjects for the tourism majors in highervocational education (HVE) aiming to train the students with the practical skills andknowledge in tourism industry especially communicative competence. All languageteachers realize the importance of teaching “use” more than just the “usage”. How todevelop the communicative competence remains a hard nut that the traditionalteaching method is not satisfactory. Communicative competence has been a hotresearch issue in foreign language teaching (FLT) field, and English teachers areengaged in seeking effective ways to enhance the learning effect.Project-based approach has gained its popularity in elementary, vocational andhigher education since1980s with learner-centered learning through problems solvingand project implementation. PBA engages students in learning essential knowledgeand life-enhancing skills through an extended, student-influenced inquiry processstructured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products andtasks. According to the theory, the students engage their interest and motivation uponthe authentic learning activities. These activities are designed to answer a question orsolve a problem and generally reflect the types of learning and work people do in theeveryday world outside the classroom.Project Based Learning teaches students21st century skills as well as content.These skills include communication and presentation skills, organization and timemanagement skills, research and inquiry skills, self-assessment and reflection skills,group participation and leadership skills. PBA is generally done by groups of studentsworking together toward a common goal. Performance is assessed on an individualbasis, and takes into account the quality of the product produced, the depth of contentunderstanding demonstrated, and the contributions made to the ongoing process ofproject realization. It allows students to reflect upon their own ideas and opinions,exercise voice and choice, and make decisions that affect project outcomes and the learning process in general.More and more educators are using projects to engage and challenge students,integrate curricular areas, and promote higher-order thinking skills. Every PBAproponent says it’s a better way to teach and learn. Teachers and students say theywouldn’t go back to the old way of learning. While in FLT, there are few researches onhow to develop integrated communicative competence in PBA in vocational academy,and few comparative studies between them. In language teaching and learning process,promoting a communicative competence will depend on just how it is used, and howgrammatical and situational factors are taken into account in the manner of itsimplementation.Therefore, it is helpful to survey how PBA developingcommunicative competence in order to establish rapport learner-centered evidenceand improve language teaching and learning in vocational education.This study is concerned with PBA focusing on helping students move throughan inquiry process that stimulates their thinking, engages them in authentic tasks, anddemands demonstration of mastery, and develops the academic content and the21stcentury skills they need for life success and valued by today’s global industries. Theskills are also called job readiness skills including basic academic skills (reading,writing, oral communication and listening), higher order thinking skills (learning,reasoning, creative thinking, decision making and problem solving), and personalqualities (responsibility, self-confidence, self-control, social skills, honesty, integrity,adaptable and flexible, team-spiritedness, punctual and efficient, self-directedness,good work attitude, well-groomed, cooperative, self-motivated andself-management).Because of time limitation, communicative competence andlearning strategies are examined in more details in this research.Communicative competence consists of grammatical competence, discoursecompetence, socio-cultural competence and strategic competence. Grammaticalcompetence refers to sentence level grammatical forms, the ability to recognize the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological feature of a language and to makeuse of these features to interpret and form words and sentences. Discoursecompetence is concerned with the interconnectedness of a series of utterances, writtenwords, and/or phrases to form a text, a meaningful whole. Socio-cultural competenceis an interdisciplinary field of inquiry having to do with the social rules of languageuse. Cultural awareness becomes more important than cultural knowledge.Strategic competence is represented as coping strategies in unfamiliar contexts orimperfect knowledge of rules. Communicative competence is rather relative to eachother which is essential and all components are interrelated. Developingcommunicative competence needs a framework for elaborating program goals to usethe language. It is a complex and unstable concept whose understanding involves aconsideration of a range of issues within discourse analysis, pragmatics, and thetheory of grammar (Swain1985; Richards1986).Closely with the recent development research and theory in PBA, the presentstudy mainly aims to investigate PBA design, operation, evaluations, attributions andexpectancy for learners’ success and failure in English learning and to compare theperceptions between teachers and learners, in order to explore pedagogicalimplications for vocation English education. The study explores PBA in tourismEnglish teaching based on the theories of ESP, Multi-intelligence, Constructivism,John Dewey’s Educational Theory, Krashen’ Input and Swain’s Output Theory bysetting certain tourism context for the learners. Sixty sophomores of tourism Englishmajor from Shandong College of Tourism and Hospitality (SDTH) were selected assubjects in the study. There were Oral English tests before and after the study in orderto find out the PBA’s effect on communicative competence. Questionnaire wasdesigned on the basis of a pilot study testing learning strategies and opinions for16-weeks outcome. The data collected from the questionnaires, pretste and posttestwere analyzed by using SPSS. Both descriptive statistics and independent samples t-tests were conducted in analyzing the process. Descriptive statistics was computedto get a general idea about the learners’ learning strategies. Independent samplest-tests were employed to identify if there was any significant difference between EGand CG in communicative competence.The study attempts to answer the followingquestions:1) Is PBA conductive to enhance the learners’ communicative competence?2) How does PBA enhance the learners’ communicative competence?3) How does PBA develop the learners’ learning strategies in PBA?4) What are the learners and the teachers’ perceptions on PBA?Statistical analysis of the collected data yields the following four findings: EGstudents’ communicative competence has improved and they basically have positiveparticipation in the whole project. In PBA, EG students have a good interdisciplinaryknowledge and well-preparation which give them more confidence and opportunitiesto communicate in English. Teacher basically possesses positive opinion for learners’English learning in PBA. Learners’ learning strategies have developed in the processof PBA.Based on the findings and discussion of the study, the thesis explores severalpedagogical implications for English teachers to improve their classroom engagement.PBA can enhance learners’ self-learning autonomy while teachers can enrich theirauthority. The study also suffers some limitations and recommendations (such as thesmall sample size and the technique for data collection, time limitation, differentEnglish levels among learners), which need to be improved in future research.