Rethinking English Teaching in Higher Vocational Education through an Ecological Approach

Abstract

Higher vocational education has developed rapidly, but it still faces the problem of being scattered and lacking overall coherence. This study, from an ecological perspective, regards the actual problems existing in teaching as a kind of structural disconnection within the educational ecosystem. From the four core principles of ecological linguistics (holism, dynamics, interaction, and situatedness), it examines the typical disconnection problems in teaching: the inconsistency between learning goals and educational goals, the mismatch between the taught content and the update speed, the inconsistency between the expected teaching methods and the actual teaching methods, and the disconnection between learning and the professional environment. The study uses the questionnaire survey data from a vocational university in Hainan Province (N=346) as a reference to verify the applicability of this theory. At the same time, based on ecological diagnosis, a three-layer ecological restoration model consisting of student ecological niche (core circle), teaching operation (inner circle), and environmental support (outer circle) is proposed. This provides an analytical framework for diagnosing the imbalance problems in the teaching system and a theoretical model for guiding systematic reforms.