Action Research Into Instructional Design Of The First Underground In The World In Unit 4,Module 7,Advance With English

This action research was undertaken to explore how a pre-service teacher made an instructional design of The First Underground in the World in Unit 4,Module 7,Advance with English,published by Yilin in terms of effectiveness,efficiency and appealingness under the guidance of the internship instructor.The theoretical bases in this study were Cognitive Learning Theory and Constructivism.The significance of this study lies in three aspects:helping to enrich the existing research on instructional design;helping to make spiral improvement by research in action,research on action and research for action and helping to promote professional development.The participants were the author and students from two arts classes in Grade Two at a four-star high school in Yangzhou.The author went through her internship as a pre-service teacher at that school.The instructional design of the Reading text was conducted under the guidance of the author’s internship instructor.In this study,the teaching material the author made instructional design of was the text The First Underground in the World,which introduced the development of London Underground system whose distinction was to be the oldest and most complex underground system of the 19th century.The research mainly contained three types of instruments:classroom observation,teaching journal and interview.The action research contained two cycles.The first cycle involved problem identification,plan making:instructional design of the teaching process,plan implementation,assessments and reflections.The second cycle was comprised of problem re-identification,plan re-making:instructional re-design,plan re-implementation,re-assessments and re-reflections.The data were mainly collected before class,in class and after class,and analyzed by means of classification and eomparison.The major findings were as the following.Firstly,in terms of effectiveness,both the "key-word" strategy and the "key-letter"strategy were effective,with the latter a little more effective than the former.The post-class interviews with the students in the first cycle found that almost all the students could retell the main idea of the text with the key words,though one low achiever did it partially in Chinese.However,the post-class interviews with the students in the second cycle found that almost all the students could retell the main idea with its form integrated by the key letters P and W.Secondly,in terms of efficiency,both the "key-word" strategy and the "key-letter"strategy were somewhat efficient,with the latter a little more efficient than the former.The post-class interviews with the internship instructor showed that in the previous reading classes,a teacher usually devoted 45-minute period for the students to grasp the main idea of the text while the author only used about 42 minutes in the first cycle and 40 minutes in the second cycle,which were not easy to attain.Thirdly,in terms of appealingness,the instructional design in the second cycle was more appealing than the previous one.According to the teaching journals respectively recorded after the first cycle and the second cycle,students did not respond actively when the author used the pictures and sounds as lead-in,however,many students in the second cycle cracked smiles and some expressed surprise on their faces when the author used the"letter game" which was related to "key-letter" strategy and the game did not occupy too much time.The post-class interviews with the students also showed that students in the first cycle were not very interested in the pictures and sounds of public transport provided by the author,while students in the second cycle deemed that the"letter game" was fresh and appealing.There were three implications.Firstly,English teachers can try to use "key-word"strategy and "key-letter" strategy in their instructional designs in order to make the class more effective,efficient and appealing.Secondly,teachers can explore a better instruction design of the single class through action research.Thirdly,teachers should try to use some creative activities in their instructional designs to arouse the students’ interest and enthusiasm.