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Overall Unit Teaching Design of Military English Listening and Speaking from the Perspective of Big Ideas

Author(s)

Xiaohua Li*, Li Jiang, Min Song

Affiliation(s)

Air Force Early Warning Academy, Wuhan, China *Corresponding Author

Abstract

The 2018 military academy syllabus mandates Military English as a compulsory content for cadets. In practice, however, teachers often follow the textbook mechanically, lacking an integrated understanding of unit content, which leads to fragmented knowledge acquisition, imbalanced listening and speaking practice, and ineffective material integration. To address these issues, this paper proposes a holistic unit teaching design for Military English listening and speaking guided by the concept of Big Ideas. Taking Unit 6 "Convoy" as an example, the study examines the internal connections among listening texts, reorganizes teaching resources following the Production-Oriented Approach, and implements an integrated design of teaching, learning, and assessment activities. This design enables teachers to move beyond isolated language instruction, establish coherent unit frameworks, and embed ideological and political education naturally into language teaching. The holistic unit design based on Big Ideas thus offers a practical approach to improving both teaching effectiveness and cadets' communicative competence.

Keywords

Big Ideas; Military English Listening and Speaking Instruction; Holistic Unit Teaching; Ideological and Political Education; Production-Oriented Approach (POA)

References

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