Application Of PBL Model In English Reading Teaching Of College Music Majors

The essential goal of college English teaching is to activate students’potential, and helpthem engage independently and actively into English learning, so as to solve problems withEnglish in work and life. As one of the four fundamental language skills, reading is animportant part of college English course and has been widely studied by a vast of educationalresearchers.In many universities, the current English reading teaching is still teacher-centered,which puts excessive focus on grammar and vocabulary but ignores students’ initiative andcreativity. This makes the reading class relatively monotonous and students are inclined toaccept knowledge passively, which will often lead to the phenomena ofhigh scores and low abilities. For a special group of learners, musical majors, the challenge inlearning English is bigger. They are not as strong as students in science or art majors inreading comprehension ability or learning motivation and learning attitude and so on. In orderto change this situation, the traditional teaching mode needs improving.Problem-based Learning (PBL) is a relatively new teaching mode based on the goal ofconstructing learning experiences, and based on constructivism, cooperative theory andmotivational theory. It is organized to seek solution to unclear problems in real life. It putslearning into a responsible and meaningful problem context and cultivates students’ interestand ability of active learning, including cooperation with others, independent decision-making,information collecting and problem solving, etc.In order to test whether the application of PBL mode can enable students to activelyacquire knowledge in the language learning process and further improve their reading skills,the researcher carries out an empirical study in music majors’English reading class. The studyattempts to answer the following questions: 1. Will there be a significant difference in students’ reading interest between theexperimental class applying the PBL model and control class without applying the PBLmodel?2. Will there be a significant difference in students’ reading proficiency between theexperimental class and control class?3. How will the relationship between the students and teacher change in theexperimental class after applying PBL model?There are60sophomores from the music department of Shanxi Normal Universityparticipating in the experiment. They are from two intact classes, taught by the same teacher.They are respectively called experimental class, adopting PBL mode, and control class,adopting the traditional teaching mode. The experimental period lasts for a whole semester.Through a comparative study between the experimental class and control class, the researchermakes an evaluation of the experimental effect. In this thesis the author used the followingmethods: questionnaire, test and interview. The quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS13.0.The result shows that PBL model can stimulate students’ reading motivation andimprove students’ reading interest and skills more effectively compared with the traditionalteaching model. Meanwhile, it can also develop the relationship between the students andteacher. Based on the result, the thesis proposes to construct systematic application of PBLteaching model in the English reading teaching process.