| Classroom teaching has enhanced the development of school education since it came into being. However, as it cannot meet the needs of individual as well as collective teaching at the same time, educators have tried many ways to perfect it, or even take the place of it. Due to the present situation in China, junior English teaching is carried on mostly in large-sized classes. As the pupils are different in their emotional attitudes, knowledge levels, learning strategies and abilities, teachers find a heavy load resulting from repeated work and a lot of difficulties in classroom teaching organization. The most serious problem of such a kind of teaching lies in the fact that not enough attention is paid to the pupils as individuals. As a result, gaps between the pupils keep growing. The teaching effect is of course unsatisfactory.During August and September in 2002, the teaching and research institute of Wuchang District sponsored a training course for the junior middle school teachers on the new textbook teaching. An open survey was conducted among the teachers who were asked to present one of the most puzzling problems in their teaching. 259 papers were collected. About seventy-three percent of the teachers presented the same problem concerning what they could do to teach the whole class and satisfy the needs of every individual successfully at the same time. In their discussion they suggested group teaching as an efficient way to improve the classroom teaching.Group teaching is based on Constructivism. Constructivists state that the purpose of learning is for every individual to construct his or her own understanding of meaning. They argue that learning is an active process in which the learner uses a sensory input and constructs meaning out of it. The learner does not acquire knowledge that exists "out there" passively. He has to choose and construct the information actively. As an intermediary, the teacher should provide the learner with lots of learning experiences and chances. Teaching should meet the needs of different learners as well as all learners. One of the essential ideas of the newEnglish Course Criteria is to emphasize individualism and individual differences. That's why the author has picked up this topic as her object of study and a subsidiary part of a key educational project of Wuchang District-Junior Middle School English Teaching Based on Constructivism (No. 58 [2001]).Oral tests will be held among the students who are going to the key senior high schools in 2004. However, unlike college English teaching, oral English teaching in middle schools is hard to conduct, as there are no oral courses offered. The author has tried the method of group teaching in Junior 1 of a middle school for a year. According to the differences in pupils' cognitive level, learning style, attitude and emotion, different group teaching goals, strategies and assessments are made in order to make the teaching suitable for the individuals. Certain effect has been achieved: The learners speak English actively. Their oral English has been greatly improved. Other abilities like reading and writing have also been improved.The essay consists of six parts. The first part presents the question and background information. The second part covers the definition and the theoretical bases of group teaching. The third part discusses how the method of group teaching is used in the English teaching in Junior 1. And the following part includes an analysis of the teaching effect. Some problems or puzzles encountered during the teaching are presented in the fifth part. The last part is a summary of the whole essay. It is hoped that more and more teachers will work out better and more effective ways to improve classroom teaching of English in China.
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