Applied participatory learning for teaching professional English to students majoring in nuclear disciplines in China

Introduction. This article deals with design and development of participatory learning. Three different perspectives: literature review, students' feedback and teachers' feedback were analyzed. The relevance of this study is determined by the apparent improvement of students' proficiency of English, deeper knowledge about their profession and higher self-confidence in and after classes. The purpose of this article is to use participatory learning methods to build a new and more effective educational process for professional English teaching. Materials and Methods. Our research implemented the principle of participatory learning to improve the students' communicative ability of English. Visual aids were applied to enrich teaching methods and open classroom setting was adopted to upgrade the learning atmosphere. Group learning mode was to cultivate students' ability of communication and cooperation. Theme-based teaching setting was carried out to encourage students' self-study ability, knowledge summary ability and creativity. Questionnaires, interview and peer observation were used. The objectives of the experiment were 50 third-year students majoring in radiation protection and nuclear safety at Chengdu University of Technology. Results. Survey results reflect different aspects of students' perception of the new settings, encountered difficulties in learning and new challenges for teachers. The positive feedbacks to the experiment were received from peer teachers. It is found that students of PLA group were more active, better performed in courses, and had an average increase of 8.18 points (total 100 points) in exams. Discussion and Conclusion. Our results and discussions lie in the smart connection between nuclear studies and English learning, and are based on varied qualitative research methods to verify the effectiveness of participatory learning. Through the analysis of the results, it can be seen that participatory learning has changed the traditional teaching mode to a certain extent and the nuclear major students were more effectively engaged in the professional English classes. It is, therefore, recommended to apply the research results to engineering related ESP practices at universities and colleges in China or in other culture.