An Empirical Study On The Student-centered Teaching Model

In the process of learning English, students are faced with various problems, of which efficiencyand lasting interest are critical factors affecting their achievement. The traditional teacher-centeredteaching approach can not provide a good solution to the problems, while the student-centered teachingmodel proposed by many experts and scholars may help students study English passionately andeffectively. Under the guidance of the teaching reform of college English, student-centered teachingapproach has been widely adopted and great achievement has been made. However, there is a long wayto go for perfection of the approach, and finding a more efficient way to teach students English,listening and speaking in particular, is still one of the most important tasks for English teachers today.The thesis is aimed at exploring the effectiveness of the new student-centered teaching modelbased on classroom participation and autonomous learning. For that purpose, an empirical study is madewhich involves 214 subjects altogether in the past two years. The researcher made both quantitative andqualitative study by analyzing the data collected by classroom observation, questionnaire, interviewsand tests. The results show that classroom participation is quite effective because it can arouse students'motivation to learn and use English and help them achieve efficiency to a great extent. The performanceor"show"in particular, as a form of classroom participation, can greatly get students involved in alanguage learning environment, practicing their oral English and developing their creativity as well. Atthe same time, students'practice in the autonomous center facilitates the development of their listeningand oral English as well. In general, this combined teaching model which unifies class interaction andautonomous learning as an integrated whole enjoys advantages over the traditional teacher-centeredteaching model.From the research, some implications are obtained, which include viewing arousing students'motivation to learn English as the top priority for English teachers, providing students with a goodEnglish-learning environment, adjusting both teacher's and students'roles properly, maximizing classparticipation in a variety of forms and developing students'autonomy and learning strategies.