A Practical Study on Workplace Scenario Demonstration Teaching in Vocational College English from the Perspective of the Output Hypothesis

ZENG Yangxue

Abstract

Against the backdrop of China’s ongoing vocational education reform, vocational college English courses are oriented toward cultivating students’ practical language skills and postmatching communicative competence. Nevertheless, traditional classroom practice has long been dominated by knowledgeoriented input activities, where teachers focus on explaining vocabulary, grammar and textbook texts while offering limited opportunities for students to produce authentic language output. Such teaching practice easily gives rise to the wellknown phenomenon of “dumb English”, under which students can recognize words and understand written passages but fail to deliver appropriate oral expressions when facing realworld workplace communication tasks. Drawing on Merrill Swain’s Output Hypothesis in secondlanguage acquisition research, this paper carries out quasiexperimental teaching research centered on workplace scenario demonstration. Over a sixteenweek teaching cycle, data are collected through oral proficiency pretests and posttests, questionnaires and classroom observation. Research findings indicate that workplace scenario demonstration guided by outputdriven principles can effectively improve vocational students’ oral fluency, linguistic accuracy and workplaceoriented pragmatic competence. It also helps relieve orallearning anxiety and enhances students’ overall motivation and selfconfidence in English learning. This study provides practical pedagogical references for promoting outputoriented reform in vocational college English teaching.

Keywords

Output HypothesisVocational college EnglishWorkplace scenario demonstrationLanguage outputWorkplace communicative competence

References

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