Pedagogical Practices In The English Classroom Of Junior High School And Senior High School: An Observation Study

The New English Curriculum and Pedagogy Standards recommends that Englishclassroom teaching should emphasize purposeful communication and interaction in order toimprove overall teaching quality and upgrade student communicative competence. In thecommunicative and international process, teachers should provide more opportunities forstudents to participate in meaningful task-based activities. Research shows that classroomdiscourse serves not only as a means of organizing classroom activities but also the mainresources of student comprehensible input and output in the learning process.This thesis, from perspective of sociocultural theory, reports a comparison of Englishclassroom pedagogical practices of junior high schools and senior high schools and aims tofind out whether student discourse production and teacher's classroom discourse strategies arerespectively different in the two grades of schools. Through the quantitative and descriptiveanalysis of thirty-two classes by using the English Classroom Coding Scheme, and teacher'sclassroom discourse strategies quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed by the transcriptiondata of those classrooms, the results of this study are listed as follows: 1) The Englishclassroom instruction is teacher-centered in general. 2) The development of studentproductive skills, for example, speaking and writing are emphasized in the classrooms ofjunior high school, but student receptive skills such as listening and reading are the focus inthose of the senior high school. 3) The amount of student discourse production in the juniorhigh school English classrooms is larger than that of the senior high school. 4) In the aspect ofteacher's classroom discourse strategies, teachers in the junior high school ask morereferential questions than those of senior high school while teacher feedbacks are notsignificantly different between the two grades of schools. Thus, the implication of thisresearch are 1) as the organizer of English classroom teaching, teacher should create variedand many student-centered activities to provide student more opportunities of communicationand interaction. 2) Teacher as mediation should also employ effective classroom discoursestrategies as much as possible to promote student classroom discourse participation.