A Study On Senior High School English Unit-Integrated Teaching Design From The Perspective Of Big Ideas

The systematicness,centrality and transferability of students’ knowledge are in urgent need of improvement.English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017 Edition,2020 revision)proposes that emphasis should be placed on the subject concept as the core to structure the curriculum content,so that theme-oriented curriculum content can be implemented.As a new point,big ideas are being more and more widely used in teaching.The centrality,permanence and transference in big ideas have been recognized by many teachers and researchers to solve the problems of fragmentation,utilitarianism,stereotyping,and promote the virtuous cycle of teaching and learning.This study reveals how to conduct the unit-integrated teaching design of high school English based on big ideas by answering the following three research questions:(1)How do high school English teachers understand and practise the unit-integrated teaching from the perspective of big ideas?(2)How does the unit-integrated teaching design based on big ideas affect students’ self-assessment of English learning?(3)What is the unit-integrated teaching effect based on big idea?In this study,100 students from two parallel classes in the first grade of a middle school in Ningde City were selected as research subjects to carry out a teaching experiment for half a semester to verify the unit-integrated teaching efficacy based on big ideas and to test teachers’ and students’ cognition and evaluation of this method.Before the experiment,the scores of students’ entrance examination to the high school were collected,and the outline of teachers’ interview and students’ questionnaire were designed.In the experiment,the unit-integrated teaching design based on big ideas was adopted.After the experiment,the mid-term examination scores and the result of the questionnaire of students were also collected.The research results are as follows:(1)It can be seen from the interview that the current English teachers in senior high schools do not have a deep understanding of the unit-integrated teaching and big ideas,and they seldom implement unit-integrated teaching based on big ideas,because many of them are afraid of wasting time in classroom or suffer poor teaching effect,or some of them do not know the specific operation steps,they do not have extra energy to study the new teaching method,and the limitation of teachers’ abilities also influence the use of this teaching method.(2)Independent sample t-test was conducted before and after the experiment.The pre-experiment t-test shows that the sig.is 0.779,which indicates that there is no significant difference between the two classes,the post-experiment t-test shows that the sig.is 0.025,which indicates that there is a significant difference between the two classes in self-evaluation of English learning,especially the difference in the two dimensions of "reading" and "big idea"(0.033 and 0.000 respectively).From the key words of the items like "implied meaning","summary points","cognition ability","new situation",we can see great changes have taken place in students’ learning,knowledge transferring and practical ability,which helps to realize education value.(3)Through the independent sample t-test of students’ pre-and post-experiment scores,the sig.value is 0.532,which shows that there is no significant difference between the two classes.Nevertheless,before the experiment the average score of the experimental class is1.802 points lower than that of the control class,after the experiment the average score of the experimental class is 3.525 points higher than that of the control class,which reveals that although the unit-integrated English teaching design from the perspective of big ideas cannot have a significant impact on students’ examination performance,it can still help improve scores of the experimental subjects to a certain extent.Based on all the above research results,this study proposes that teachers should strengthen theoretical learning and creative teaching,schools should organize activities,like team-discussion,etc.to lead teaching design to continuous reforming.