On The Role Of The Native Language In Junior High School English Teaching

In order to provide English surroundings in classes, junior high school English teachers are often encouraged to teach only in English during the 45-minute class. In fact, it's time consuming without much actual effect in return. As time goes on, some students will feel difficult and reluctant to continue. So, whether we can use the native language to improve the learning and teaching efficiency is very important. Some scholars and teachers affirm the native language's positive role and apply it to the daily teaching. However, the emphasis of those studies has been placed on the college teaching and the elementary school English teaching, and no much attention is given to the high school English teaching. Some traditional teaching methods (i.e., the grammar-translation method, conscious contrast method, and so on) have some defects in cultivating the performance competence, although they rely heavily on the native language to pass on the language knowledge. Therefore, this article attempts to explore whether the use of the native language results in the positive consequence in the junior high school English teaching., The aim is to interest students in English by "borrowing" the native language and understand English deeply. Therefore, beyond the bounds of limited English knowledge, they can broaden their thought when expressing and finally, benefit from the native language during studying. Relevant experiments have been done in two Junior I classes. The result shows that the students of moderate competence (usually, most of the students in a class belong to this group.) benefit greatly from the help of Chinese explanation. Choosing different teaching techniques has little influence on the most competent students and those need help most. This result sheds some light on a new understanding of the role the native language plays in junior high school English teaching.