Chapter One Introduction
Cooperative learning has enjoyed a long history of both theory and practice.Many researchers have defined the concept of CL in different ways. Based on thesedefinitions, the author of this thesis tends to view the term of CL as a successfulteaching strategy. It makes full use of the dynamic elements in class and takes groupwork as its basic form. The group members will negotiate and inquire in order tofulfill a learning task cooperatively and the teacher will make assessments accordingto the achievements gained by the group.
1.1 The current situation of business English negotiationteaching in higher vocational technical colleges
Business English has witnessed great advancement in the past two decades andattracted increasing interest and awareness. It must be seen in the overall context ofEnglish for Specific Purposes (ESP). Business English Negotiation Course (BENC) isone of the most important courses of ESP, which differs from English for GeneralPurposes (EGP). This course is the final practice of business English learning whoseobjective is to cultivate practical and technical interdisciplinary business Englishtalents and students' negotiation ability under foreign business environment. To becapable of the future job, the students should master the negotiation skills andcross-cultural knowledge and learn to use English in foreign trade communication.However, business English negotiation teaching has many problems.One of the problems is the single teaching mode. The teaching method manyteachers for ESP adopt can not fulfill the teaching objective of BENC. Teachers adoptthe Grammar Translation method to guide their teaching, while the students just sitthere and listen to them. But higher vocational basic requirements on English teachingrequires higher vocational English teaching should follow the practical and sufficientprinciple and specialized course teaching should put stress on pertinence andapplication, but because of the restrict of the traditional teaching, part of the highervocational technical colleges still use the traditional teacher-centered teaching pattern.Consequently, textbook learning and social practice cannot effectively be combined,which leads to the serious separation of theory and practice. The second problem isthe lack of teachers with inter-disciplinary knowledge in some higher vocationaltechnical colleges. The teachers in the specific field do not understand the realbusiness environment and lack the enterprise or company working experience. Thethird one is the exam standard. At present, the test system of BENC in our country isshort of a unified, concrete operating standard. Many teachers usually rely on thesubjective judgment and the spoken language test becomes a form, so it can not reallytest out students' practical English skills and communication skills.Anqing Vocational Technical College offered BENC for Business English majorsin 2017. BENC has become an important specialized course. But with the timepassing by, although teaching contents, teaching means, teacher team structure, theconstruction of training bases and the course have been paid much attention to and thestudents also spend a lot of time and energy studying spoken English for businessnegotiation, the result is not ideal enough. It has been an urgent task for all teachersand school authorities to completely change the traditional teaching mode an，英语论文题目，英语论文范文 |
