IP: 109.94.221.159 On: Sun, 02 Feb 2020 08:32:54 Copyright: American Scientific Publishers Delivered by Ingenta RESEARCH ARTICLE Copyright © 2017 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience Vol. 14, 104–108, 2017 Designing and Practice of a College English Teaching Platform Based on Artificial Intelligence Shuli Zou Foreign Language Department, Huanghuai University, Zhumadian 463000, Henan, China College English is one of the basic core courses for all college students in China. The course involves many difficult concepts and grammatical structures, so it is difficult to most of the students. The starting point in any teaching program is to determine whether teaching is needed to specify what that teaching should accomplish. So the students’ need is of vital importance to the success of college English teaching. Traditional college English teaching does not take into account students’ individual learning abilities and feedbacks, which would cause students to grasp the key knowledge not enough, and then make students lose their interest in English. The purpose of this paper is to establish a college English teaching platform, and using artificial intelligence to find the needs of college students and know about mastering knowledge of students. The platform can adjust the teaching schedule and contents through artificial intelligence algorithm. Statistical data of several years show that the average score of students who used the platform to learn college English is far higher than those students who didn’t use the platform. Hence, the platform can improve students’ autonomous learning and English abilities. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Teaching Platform. 1. INTRODUCTION In China, College English is not only a language course that provides basic knowledge about English, but also a capacity enhancement course that helps students to broaden their horizons and learn about different cultures in the world. Design of college English course should help students to have a solid foundation in the English language while developing their ability to use English, especially their ability to communicate in English. It should ensure that students make steady progress in English proficiency and encourage students’ individualized learning so as to meet the needs of their development in different specialties. The history of college English teaching has been char- acterized by a search for more effective ways of teaching English languages. The teaching of any subject matter is usually based on an analysis of the nature of the subject itself and the application of teaching and learning princi- ples drawn from research and theory in educational psy- chology. The result is generally referred to as a teaching method or approach, by which we refer to a set of core teaching and learning principles together with a body of classroom practices that are derived from them. There are many academic researchers and teachers interesting in researches of college English teaching. Needs Analysis is “a device to know the learners’ neces- sities, needs, and lacks in order to develop curriculum that have a reasonable content for exploitation in the classroom.” 2 Objective needs refer to all factual information about learners, that is the “biographical data” 5 such as previ- ous language courses, current proficiency level, language difficulties, use of language in real life, the length of time spent in the target culture and previous, current and intended occupation. The objective needs can be diagnosed by teachers on the basis of the analysis of personal data about learners along with information about their language proficiency and patterns of language use. 1 Subjective needs refer to the cognitive and affective needs of learners in language learning, such as confidence, attitudes and expectations. In the case of curriculum, learn- ers’ subjective needs also include “the preferred length and intensity of a course, the preferred learning arrangement, the preferred methodology, learning styles.” 8 Robinett 9 proposed the conceptions of target needs and learning needs. Target needs focus on the situations in which the target language is used. It is concerned with what the learner needs to do in the target situation. In learners’ target needs, great importance is attached to ana- lyzing both the situation where the target language will be 104 J. Comput. Theor. Nanosci. 2017, Vol. 14, No. 1 1546-1955/2017/14/104/005 doi:10.1166/jctn.2017.6133