A Survey Of The Current State Of The Second-Year Students' English Learning In Changsha's Key Junior Middle Schools

The second-year students in junior middle schools are lively, have relatively strong desires and interest for learning English, but polarization is most seen which directly affects students' English achievements and also hinders the improvement of junior English teaching quality. So far, junior English teaching still revolves around the High School Entrance Examination which is an invisible "director stick" to teaching. In order to get high marks in various exams, both teacher and students have to spend most of the classroom time on exercise explaining, leaving little or no time for teacher-students interaction and students' improvement in learning abilities. What's worse, we have not yet seen any fundamental changes through the middle school curriculum reform in the past few years.Therefore, a questionnaire survey study was carried on among 1,000 second-year students in Changsha's four key middle schools, namely NO.1 Middle School, Changjun Middle School, Yali Middle School, and the High School Attached to Hunan Normal University. The author analyzed the current state of the second-year students, attempted to find out problems from the first -hand data, and explored the solutions to these problems, so as to improve the English teaching quality.According to the questionnaire, the current state of the second-year students' English learning is characterized:1) Students have high learning motivations and interest, but their learning motivations mainly come from outside pressure, such as going abroad, passing exams, which are instrumental motivations.2) Students haven't formed a good English learning habit. So their learning effects are not very satisfactory , but most of them still have confidence in learning English well.3) Teachers still adopt a traditional, one-way transmissive teaching approach. Teaching without situations and communication is not good for the students' practical comprehensive competence of language application.4) Teaching environment and teaching facilities have been greatly improved. Whole-class English speaking teaching and multi-media aided classroom will benefit to the students' English learning.Based on these findings, the author analyzed the investigation results from three perspectives of students, teachers and society, and put forward corresponding solutions to these problems. A possible solution is to apply the Task-based Approach and Cooperative Learning to our classroom teaching. The author puts forward a fast-rhythm teaching method to enhance classroom teaching density, width and depth, so as to improve English teaching efficiency and cultivate students' practical application abilities.