English Teaching Research For The Majors In Foreign Related Business In Secondary Vocational School

Since the reform and opening up, China has undergone tremendous changes with political stability, economic prosperity, cultural flourishing, especially the success of 2008 Olympics Games and 2010 World Expo and China’s international status promotes significantly, more and more foreigners come to China and Chinese foreign related industry faces unprecedented development opportunities and challenges. Following that is the great demands in personnel for foreign services industry, like aviation, business, hotels and tourism, which has higher requirements for the employees in related industry. The personnel with professional and foreign language skills(especially English) become more and more popular. As the specialized training of skilled personnel, the secondary vocational schools offer many majors that need to have contacts with foreign guests. And this kind of schools will certainly become the main source of skilled personnel for foreign services industry. However, since low English level for the vocational students, also with the failure of mobilizing their enthusiasm to learn English during teaching, especially fails to enable the students to really appreciate the role of English in their future work. Therefore, how to improve English teaching quality for foreign related majors in vocational schools is the urgent issue need to be addressed, especially for English teachers.Demand analysis is the center and starting point of ESP, English as one of the important branch of ESP, English teaching should be based on the demands analysis. Therefore, with accordance of the demand analysis model of Hutchinson & Water and Dudley-Evans & St. John’s, questionnaires and interview investigations were implemented for the students and graduates in the majors of tourism and nursing in secondary vocational school, as well as the English teachers and employers in tourism and nursing. After quantitative and qualitative analysis for the survey results, we found that compared with the ordinary English, there are problems exists in selections for teaching materials, key teaching points, teaching methods, ways of examinations, teaching staff, etc. in secondary vocational schools. I made some suggestions in improving current English teaching situation aims at existing problems and combined with the result of demand analysis. For example, try to develop school-based teaching materials based on the existing ones; Key teaching points should be on training the hearing and speaking abilities for the students, and on teaching method, the students activities should be given primary efforts and supplemented by teachers lecturing; elements of cultural should be in the teaching content and reflecting the characteristics of English; strengthen the quality of teaching staff and encourage the teachers to develop as "Double" teachers. With the hope of helping improve English teaching through this study at my school and thus provide a useful reference for English teaching reform for similar kind of schools.Finally, because of the limited participation of students, teachers and employers, the author points out that this study has some limitations. Also the author hopes to examine the suggestions raised in this study in future work and continue to have in-depth research to further help improve English Teaching.