Development and Pedagogical Adaptability of Corpus-Based Multimodal Digital Textbooks for College English in Higher Vocational Colleges

Abstract

The reform of College English education in chinese HVEs is urgently needed and it needs to align language instructions with students’ future jobs. Textbooks used in traditional education are designed mainly for general academic purposes. Textbooks used in traditional education can never be effective in motivating vocational students or equipping them with useful English to use at work. This paper fills this important vacuum with a thorough exposition about the systematic creation, usage, and evaluation of a multimodal digital textbook made from a specific kind of vocational text corpus. Two mutually supporting methodologies are adopted: the development, analysis, and mediating pedagogy of a specialized corpus embodying key vocational field’s (e.g., e-commerce, tourism, basic manufacturing, etc.) linguistic demand, and an intentional design for a multimodal digital textbook which integrates the corpus and interactive media based on cognitive learning theories. Furthermore, it studies the pedagogical adaptability of the textbook through a semesterlong mixed method case study of a large higher vocational college. It looks at effects to students participating, doing language tasks, thinking learning is worth it, and helping to change classrooms around. Findings show that use of the corpus based multimodal textbook can motivate student to learn and better outcomes are observed when students learn vocational English proficiency with relevant, authentic, scaffolded and interactive content. Integrate a model that gives a sustainable, data-driven, good solution for improving the college English teaching in higher vocational education area and make them as ready as possible to be a good employee for the industries.