Critical Review on Need-based English Teaching Practicing for Sports Students in Chinese Colleges

W ith increasing international communication in sports field, it is helpful for sports students today to be equipped with equivalent level of foreign language capability. Spots students call for effective English teaching. This paper first presents an introduction of Need Analysis development; then describes needs investigation and need-based English-teaching practice by our team among certain number of sports students. Then, it evaluates the effectiveness of need-based English teaching, m eanwhile discovers relevant problems standing out during the research. In troduction Globalization of people's communication and professional life sets more and higher demands for English language learners including sports students, especially after China successfully hosted the 2008 Olympics. So to develop sports students' English ability becomes an urgent task for Chinese universities. Effective English teaching is based on the specific needs analysis (NA) of students' English learning. Lots of related studies have been done in recent decades, such as studies on the necessity of NA(1), study of NA models(2) , practical survey of need in studying English(3), Analysis on Restrictive Factors during Automatic Learning in Sports English Teaching(4) and Investigation of Current College Sports Students English Learning(5). These studies are helpful to improve English teaching for sports students. However, questions still exist, such as: Are today's sports students satisfied with the English class? Is need-based English teaching as effective as we expect? Is there any problem in need-based English class? Pitifully, it seems that there is little follow-up study to tell the answers. This paper probes into those problems by critically reviewing the data collected from the experimental English class done by our study team.