Achieving Maximal Student Participation

Boring and monotonous classroom atmosphere with quiet and inactive students is often a stereotypical characteristic of English language learning in Chinese universities. What effective measures a qualified teacher can take to maximize student participation in the classroom has become the concern of many English teachers in the educational reform. Taking the above situation into consideration, the writer first made a review of the previous studies in the field and then conducted a survey of student participation in college English teaching classroom in her university by both class observation and questionnaire. The present paper provides a general account of the literature review and the research work in the field of student participation in ELT class. And based on the findings, the writer holds that in order to achieve maximum student participation, the instructor must pay great attention to factors such as student needs and interests, teacher's and students' roles, process-oriented and product-oriented approaches, and various devices to activate learner participation and to create highly conducive classroom atmosphere for student involvement. At the end of the paper, the writer made some tentative proposals for maximization of student participation in ELT classrooms at the college level.