The Significance Of Designing And Optimizing English Assignments In The Learner-centered ELT

Assignment, as a kind of feedback of teaching, serves to help teachers be aware of relations between teaching and learning and furthermore, to help regulate the teaching process and methods. Meanwhile, it gives students an opportunity to apply concepts and knowledge beyond the classroom and get ready for the next day's class and explore subjects more fully than time permits in the classroom teaching. Bur if poorly designed or handled, it also has the potential to confuse and frustrate students, or even deprive the students of interest and inspiration for English, which can do more damage than good to improvement of their English. But a well-designed assignment can teach students valuable language skills and improve the quality of and proficiency in English.Assignment, as an important part of English teaching, is subject to different teaching approach. Among teacher-centered, content-centered, and learner-centered one, the last one focuses on the learners'needs and perceptions and emphasizes learner autonomy, therefore it has gained popularity and provides English teaching with a new orientation. So our assignment design should support and be guided by this teaching approach.This paper explores some possible and also reasonable ways of optimising English assignments after having analysed collected questionnaires and being integrated with relative theories that aim at building the learner-centred class. The paper consists of using the relative theories to analyse and optimise the traditional assignments, of applying the relative theories in the arrangement of assigning these tasks, of illustrating the characteristic of well-designed assignments, of talking about three problems in designing assignments, and finally of suggesting several assignments'types.The paper, in some sense, concentrates more on the practical application rather than theoretical discourse, so it needs examining and perfecting in teaching practice, especially for the sake of its weakness and shortcoming, which have been pointed out at the end of paper.