A Study On The Phenomenon Of Polarization Of Middle School Students' Participation In Answering Questions In English Classroom

The English classroom teaching process itself is a communicative process, which requires both teacher and students to participate in classroom teaching together. Many researchers at home or abroad have done substantial studies on students'participation; however, they confined their studies to the following aspects:students' classroom participation pattern, the relationship between classroom participation pattern and learners' learning achievements, and students' disengagement. Few of them have noticed the phenomenon of polarization of students' participation in answering English classroom questions in junior middle school:the "target students" who tend to domain or occupy all the classroom discussions and answering; and the "silent students" who almost never participate in discussions or answering questions. The former type answer questions actively and the latter is always waiting for being called on by the teacher.Thus, this study focuses on the phenomenon of polarization of students'participation in answering English classroom questions in junior middle school.The three research questions are as follows:(1) How is the situation of polarization of middle school students'participation? (2) What factors attribute to the polarization of students' participation in answering English classroom questions in Junior Middle School? (3) How to solve this problem?And this study chose 110 8th graders and 11 teachers from Su Cun Center Middle School as the subjects, and the data were obtained through classroom observation, questionnaire and interview.The major findings are:(1) The existence of the phenomenon of polarization of students' participation is very common and obvious. There are "target students" and "silent students" in the English classroom. (2) The causes to this phenomenon are found. The internal reasons include:students'different degree of anxiety when answering questions, students'protection for their self-image, students'different levels of language ability, different recognition of their self identity, and students'personality and attentions are also included. External reasons include: teachers'factors and social cultural factors. Teachers'factors play the most important role, including:teacher's questioning styles, teacher's length of wait-time, teacher's feedback and affective tendency. (3) Measures to solve this problem will be taken mainly from two perspectives. Firstly, promote silent students' degree of classroom participation:lowering those students'degree of anxiety; promoting their self-image; designing questions according to students'language ability; prolonging wait-time and giving proper feedback. Secondly, provide every student equal opportunities to answer questions in the class, and take teachers'affective tendency into account to eliminate the marginal phenomenon in the classroom.