A Survey Of Teachers' Cognition In Effective English Teaching In College English

The effective teaching of oral English has always been one of the core objectives of the China's college English teaching reform, and also one of the key factors that decide whether non-English learners' oral English communicative skills could be well developed. However, due to different constraints, college oral English hasn't gained enough attention and thus the teaching quality and effects are far from being satisfactory. Luckily, with the focus of foreign language teaching research shifting gradually from teachers' external behaviors to teachers' inner process,researches on teachers' cognition began to thrive since 1990 s. Based on such circumstances, it seems extremely important to investigate how college teachers perceive their effective oral English teaching.This study, based on the previous researches about effective teaching and teacher cognition,adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, aiming to explore thoroughly the current situation of English teachers' cognition about effective oral English teaching and what they have been doing in real classroom teaching under the guide of their cognition. First, the survey by questionnaire is conducted about college English teachers' cognition on effective oral English teaching, and after careful process and selection, descriptive analysis is accomplished about the data received and screened from the survey, in order to discover the reality of teachers' cognition about effective teaching of oral English. Second, an interview was carried out of the randomly selected 3 teachers, and with combination of the answers to the open-ended questions and the multiple choices about teaching practice in the questionnaire, so as to reveal how college English teachers' cognitive factors affect their effective teaching behaviors. Final results show that teachers hold rather identical cognition about effective oral English teaching, which reflects modern education teaching beliefs and accounts for the latest research findings in EFL teaching, such as student-centeredness,situational language teaching and communicative language teaching, and meanwhile explains the two-sidedness of the current classroom oral English effective teaching practice influenced by both traditional and modern teaching methods, such as audiolingualism. It can be seen that college English teachers' cognition about English oral effective teaching will, to large extent,affected what they will do in class. On the one hand, under the influence of traditional teaching methods, teachers will dominate their classroom by leading their students to do more word and grammatical pattern drill; on the other hand, under the influence of situational teaching approach,they will design variety of classroom activities, to create a lively class atmosphere. But, the fact is that most of the teachers are attempting to take the advantages of both traditional and modern methods to improve the effectiveness of oral English teaching.Drawing on much from the previous researches, this study is innovative in some ways, in the way of enriching the research content and methods concerning teacher cognition and English effective teaching, and thus providing beneficial suggestions for college oral English teaching reform. At the same time, there are indeed some limitations in this study, for example, the number of the subjects and the scale of the investigation is relatively small. But, future studies will do more to make up for these deficiencies by a more scientific design.