满分

Problems and solution

-----my English teaching

I have been an English teacher in a vocational school for more than ten years. Each time we English teachers talked about the students we faced everyday and the subject we taught, “painful”, “tired” and even “unbearable” were the most high-frequency words we chose to describe. As all the people know, English is one of the most difficult subjects to teach in the vocational school while the English teachers in the school are more difficult to be. Next, I will present the problems existed during the English teaching according to my ten years’ experience of English teaching in the vocational school.

In order to have a general understanding about the situation the students learnt English, I had ever made a questionnaire among the students of grade one in our school. The content of the questionnaire referred to the students’ willing, habits, attitude and interest of learning English. I found the following problems in accordance with the analysis to the result of the questionnaire. Ⅰ. Most of the students have no aims of study.

Some students came to our school because their parents thought that their children should continue to accept education as they were too young to join in work. They failed to enter the senior school, so they had to choose the vocational school. Some students came because they wanted to acquire a certification of high school, which possibly made them gain more opportunities when they stepped into society. Only less than 15% of the students came to the school as they really wanted to learn knowledge and technology.

Ⅱ. Most of the students are not interested in English

According to the result of the questionnaire I made, about 90% of the students felt that the subject of English was very boring and they could not follow the teachers in the class. For some students, the number of vocabulary they mastered was countable and most of the words they met in the book were new for them. The more difficult the subject seems to be, the less interested the students will get in.

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Ⅲ. Few students have good habit in learning English

Because a lot of students in the vocational school did not form a good habit in learning English early when they were in junior school, they did not know how to preview, how to revise and how to make notes in the English class. They could not understand and follow teachers either even though the English teachers tried their best to make the lessons lively and funny. Some of them even fell in daydreaming in the class. The direct effect of this situation was that the students would become worse and worse in English learning.

How to solve theses problems? I thought of several ways to improve these situations bases on my experience of teaching.

Ⅰ. Update our educational concept and position ourselves correctly.

English was not the major subject in the vocational school, which I meant that it was not as important as other subjects for the students. It served different majors. As we English teachers, we should realize that the role of what we taught was to facilitate the students to master more abilities of application and operation. We must give up the old concept to evaluate the students which only cared much on the scores. We can teach different English contents according to different majors. For example, there was a tourism major in our school. When I had English lesson in that class, I would prepare many English materials related to their major such as daily communicative sentences in hotel. Because the teaching materials were useful and directly related to their major, they showed great interest and paid more efforts to it. They did not need to recite all the words instead that they should learn to express correctly in different communicative situations. Students’ talk time over exceeded Teachers’ talk time in the class because practice and drill were more important than teachers’ explanation. If we can change our traditional educational concept and realize the role of English in the vocational school and taught what the students really needed and got interested in, the students may benefit more in the English class.

Ⅱ. Choose the appropriate textbook for the students

During my more than ten years’ English teaching in the vocational school, the textbook changed more than once. Maybe the education administrators were also

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aware of the problems of English learning in the vocational school, they provided different kinds of textbooks every several years. However it seemed that the textbooks were not the best for the students. Which is the best? I think the appropriate is the best. In order to choose the appropriate textbook for the students, the teachers in our school did a great deal of work. We designed questionnaires to judge the students’ English levels and did interviews to acquaint what they really wanted to learn among all the students in the school. After analyzing the data we collected carefully, we decided to compile our own textbook named as school-based textbook, which was just used by the students in our school. This book consisted of 14 units referred to 14 topics such as transportation, weather, tourism, in the hospital and so on. The topics in the book were so popular and easy to understand that the students were willing to learn it. And because there were a great number of practice and drills in the book, students could get more practice from it than other textbooks. The students in our school will be sent to different companies after two years’ learning, oral and communicative English were more important for them. Undoubtedly, our school-based textbook was the most appropriate. This book has been used in our school for more than two years and most of the students preferred the book because not only the content of the book was not very difficult to understand but also it was very useful for them. Ⅲ. Different kinds of teaching activities and various teaching methods in the class I had ever thought that it was a waste of time to organize students’ activities in the English class because I had to spend a lot of time to prepare the activities before the class, monitor them in the class and analyze and reflect them after the class. It proved to be wrong when I was amazed to observe the students’ performance and the effect of the activities in the class. Different kinds of teaching activities not only made the students more involve in the class but also made them get twice the result with half the effort. I still remembered the scene I designed the activities to help the students acquaint the general communication on expressing asking for help. Students were demanded to make up their own dialogues in pairs with four pictures shown on the screen. Each picture was associated with a situation on asking for or offering help and the pairs can choose anyone they liked to write out a dialogue with the useful

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expressions on asking for help in the book in five minutes. And I praised the excellent dialogues after the activity. All the students took an active part in the activity and volunteered to act out their dialogues in the class. Their performance on that day was quite different from usual and it was obvious that this teaching activity was successful and efficient. From that time, I would design as many teaching activities as possible if necessary to assist the students in learning various contents in the class.

The teacher’s various teaching methods were also vital in the English class. As we all know, there are so many various teaching methods such as task-based teaching, communicative language teaching, audio-lingual, PPP and so on for us to choose and use. Each teaching method has its merits and we cannot comment which is the best but just decide to choose the most appropriate one. The teaching contents of the English book in the vocational school included listening, reading, speaking, writing. In my opinion, it mainly depended on the topic and content of the teaching material which kind of method to choose. Audio-lingual teaching method can be also chosen to teach reading just like task-based method can be used to do speaking activities after studying the teaching content and our teaching object-the students carefully.

Different kinds of teaching activities combined with various teaching methods can arouse our students’ interest in learning English and make them result more from this subject.

Ⅳ. Arrange layered tasks for the students in different levels after class.

Early more than two thousand years ago, the great educator Confucius ever stated the principle of teaching students according to their aptitude. However, it is quite difficult and not realistic to implement this principle in the class because the teachers had neither enough time nor energy to teach different content. The time after class belong to the students themselves and is it possible and efficient to implement this principle after class?

According to the data collected from the questionnaire and the observation I did in the usual, the students’ English levels were quite different in our school. Some students’ vocabulary size was very small and their grammatical knowledge was also poor while a number of students’ English level was much higher. So it was necessary

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and a must to arrange layered tasks for the students in different levels after class. The layered tasks I arranged mainly included preview, review and practice after class. Before starting a new reading lesson, I would have the students preview the new words of the reading text. Some students were asked to master the pronunciation, the meaning and the spelling of all the new words while others just demanded to understand the meaning of the words regardless of their pronunciation and spelling. The practice after the class were also various for students in different levels. Take the reading text of unit 6 for example, a part of students must recite the text and describe the scenes of four seasons in their hometown while others just need to recite the sentences describing the scenes of the four seasons in the textbook.

Before I took this approach, many students were not willing to preview the new words and there were also some students who delayed even did not hand in their homework because since they couldn’t reach the teacher’s requirement, they simply escape it. Layered tasks after class not only made the students achieve teaching goals but also promoted their confidence to learn English well. Ⅴ. Encourage and praise the students as much as possible

Based on the theory of psychology, the praise and encouragement affect mental and physical development of both children and adults. Praise is also a common mean of education.

The students in the vocational school played the role of losers and failures because of the scores they got in middle school entrance exam. Punishments and criticism were ordinary for them before they came to our school. So it was not strange the students were not active in the English class and they did not volunteer to take part in the teaching activities, it was not strange some of them gave up English as well as themselves either.

I seldom criticized the students because of their bad performances and scores in English. I did most in the class was to look for the shining points of the students to encourage and praise them. Volunteers even if they offered the wrong answers should be praised, a successful interaction should be praised, the student had progress no matter whether the degree of it was significant or not should get more praise and

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encouragement. “well done”, “good”, “you did a good job” became the high-frequency words I used in my class. After a period of time I found that more and more students raised their heads and hands in the English class and the class atmosphere became more relaxing because of the students’ active participation, which can improve the students’ learning efficiency by enhancing the students’ learning interests and stimulating their learning potential.

What I presented above was just the problems existed during my English teaching in the vocational school and the solutions I suggested here were just my own opinions even though I had applied these methods to the teaching and resulted a little. I will pay more efforts on my future teaching .

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