Designing Different Level Learning Activities To Promote Students' Participation In English Learning

Most classes in middle schools in China consist of a large number of students, ranging from more than 40 to even nearly 100 students. Yet, in such big English classes, teachers only design same tasks for all the students. Teachers ask students to reach same learning goals and fulfill same tasks at the same time. In fact, in middle schools, after at least three or more years' learning of English, the students of the same class are at different levels of English proficiency. In the class where the teacher assigns same tasks to all the students, the top students often find it so easy to finish the tasks that they think the teacher's teaching is not helpful and therefore lose their interest in English learning. On the other hand, the weaker learners feel frustrated facing the tasks and get less confident. Both of the top and weaker learners lose their motivation in English learning, and become inactive in English learning. So the researcher assumed that students would be more successful if the teachers designed the tasks with different level of difficulty to fit the students at different English proficiency levels.Many educationalists have paid great attention to the students' difference in the current learning proficiency, which provides the related theories for the researcher. Vygostsk, in his Zone of Proximal Development theory (1978), pointed out that the students' further development is based on their present learning proficiency. About second language learning, Krashen hypothesized (1977, 1982, 1985) his ideal input type, called "i+l", where the "i" can represent the learner's current stage of interlanguage development, and the "+1" designates that the input is challenging but...