An Experimental Study Of Unit Integral English Teaching Approach In A High School

In the traditional English teaching approaches in high schools, words and sentences were taught first, then the dialogue and the text was divided into several parts and analyzed one sentence by one sentence. The greatest disadvantage of this approach was that it made the students "see only trees scattered around rather than a forest". However, the new teaching materials (SEFC) are designed by unit. This requires English teachers to arrange the four lessons in each unit as a whole while teaching it. Unit Integral English Teaching Approach came into being just to satisfy this demand. It exclaims that "the integral function is larger than that of its different parts" and requires that English teachers should handle each unit of SEFC as a whole and teach each unit as an integral knowledge unit so that the students' knowledge can form a system. Teaching procedure must be an integral structure in order that the students understand and master the knowledge systematically. Learning process should be an integral cognitive one to develop the students' communicative competence. The approach stresses "discourse, integrity, contents and meaning." The class should be student-centered and discourses are paid more attention to than language forms. The purpose of learning language is to develop the students' communicative competence. These requirements of Unit Integral English Teaching Approach happen to coincide with the designing system and editing purposes of SEFC.At the beginning, the thesis offered an analysis on the backgrounds of Unit Integral English Teaching Approach, the reasons for choosing the research topic and its theoretical and practical significance. Through literature review and summary, the origin of Unit Integral English Teaching Approach, its basic conception and present achievements home and abroad were discussed. Then the theoretical support of Unit Integral English Teaching Approach, System Theory, was introduced and its basic axioms and principles were summarized. Upon this base, the experimental framework was put forward and the exemplification of the study was described in details. According to the learning strategy of System Theory, "from a whole to its parts, men return to the whole again", the basic operating procedure of Unit Integral English Teaching Approach was made up of three phases: 1. Integra] Process — forming a vague integral image of a unit, 2. Dividing Process — forming a distinct partial image, 3. Integral Process Again — forming a distinct integral image of a unit. During the dividing process, a thorough description on the different teaching models designed according to the contents of different lessons, Dialogue Teaching Model, Text Teaching Model,Teaching Model for Language Study and Teaching Model for Listening and Writing Work was offered. When the experiment was completed, data collected in the experimental procedure, answers to the students' and teachers* questionnaires, live interviewing results were analyzed and discussed by means of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Some limitations were pointed out as well. Finally, the conclusion was drawn upon the above analysis and discussion. Major findings, theoretical, methodological and practical implications, recommendations for future research were offered so that Unit Integral English Teaching Approach could be further improved and accomplished in the future high school teaching and more productivity could be brought out to amend the present "high input but low output" English teaching situation in high schools.