Experimental Study Of Communicative Language Teaching In Higher Vocational Tourism English

The demand of Tourism industry to tourism English talents is communicativecompetence; the requirement of tourism industry clerks is to improve their ability of usingEnglish; the demands to higher vocational college students written in “Higher VocationalColleges English Course Teaching Requirements (pilot edition)”, which was published in2009, are “higher vocational English course aims to train students’ practical usingcompetence, and emphasize to train communicative competence under working conditionsand make students improve their ability to use English to communicate.” All these demandsshow that higher vocational tourism English should aim to train students’ tourism Englishcommunicative competence.While the current3P method used in tourism English teaching can’t meet the needs oftourism English; Communicative Language Teaching takes communicative competence as itsteaching aim. So CLT fits to the demand of tourism industry to its talents; it matches therequirements of tourism industry clerks; it suits to the demands to higher vocational studentsand it meets the needs of tourism English teaching. What’s more, in China, the study of CLTfocuses on university students and university’s Basic English, while few on higher vocationalcollege students and tourism English. Hence this research will use an experiment to put CLTinto higher vocational tourism English teaching. The study will research the following threequestions: what are the needs of students to tourism English, how about their English learningmotivation, their favorite English learning ways and favorite classroom activities, do they usecommunicative strategies? Compared with3P method, can CLT improve tourism Englishteaching effectiveness? After one term’s experimental teaching, what are the views ofstudents to CLT, do they like and accept this method?The study chose78students from tourism management major class22and class23ofYangling Vocational and Technical College as subject to research. The study randomly chose class22as experimental class and class23as controlled class. CLT was applied toexperimental class and3P method was used in controlled class. The experiment of CLT lastedfor a term,18weeks, and3periods a week.Before the experiment, the author asked all the78students to do a questionnaire andtake a pre-test. Based on the information got from the questionnaire, the author choseappropriate teaching materials and classroom activities to do the experiment. After one termexperiment, a post-test was taken by all the78students. And10students (5males and5females) from experimental class were chosen randomly to take an interview to express theirviews towards CLT. The data from questionnaire and interview was analyzed quantitativelyand qualitatively together. The pre-test and post-test data was analyzed by SPSS19.0, whichdid descriptive analysis and independent sample T test. After the analysis, it got the followingfindings:1. The needs of students to tourism English and their favorite English learning waysand classroom activities are covered by CLT; students’ motivation’s stimulating and theircommunicative strategies’ training are also included in CLT. So compared with3P, CLT canmeet students’ tourism English needs better.2. CLT can more effectively motivate students’ enthusiasm, and it has colorfulclassroom activities, so students’ learning result is improved a lot. And compared with3P,CLT’s teaching effectiveness to tourism English is increased significantly.3. Compared with3P, students like CLT better. Students welcome and accept CLT.They think CLT is more interesting and improve their learning results more.According to the above findings, the study has theoretical, methodological and practicalmeaning. Theoretically, the study takes higher vocational college students as the subjects andtourism English as the study content, which extends the study angles of CLT and enriches thestudy content of CLT; methodologically, the study applied experimental method to study CLTwith tourism English together, which enrich the empirical study materials of CLT;pedagogically, it resolved the problems of higher vocational tourism English teaching andimproved teaching effectiveness, and the author will promote to use CLT to tourism Englishteaching in the whole college.The thesis puts out the limits of the study and gives some suggestions to future study ofCLT to tourism English in the end.