The Application Of The Experiential Teaching To Oxford English Teaching In Senior High School

Nowadays, English teaching in senior high school emphasizes that English learning is a process of active exploration, construction of knowledge and development in abilities, instead of absorbing knowledge passively. It also emphasizes that students should be able to form the active and initiative attitude towards learning and correct sense of value when learning knowledge and skills of language. To achieve that, practicing experiential teaching approach is an effective way, that is, to help students to enhance their abilities of using English in authentic environment, and form their own emotions, attitudes and sense of value by taking part in all kinds of experiential activities.This thesis is developed firstly with the analysis of the achievements and deficiencies of the Research into Experiential English Teaching in Senior High School of Wuxi Qingshan High School. Hence, the targets of this research and the possible innovation come up. Secondly, the concepts of experience, experiential teaching and experiential learning are clearly defined through the analysis of its background and the theoretic bases. Also, the differences and similarities of experiential teaching approach and the task-based approach are demonstrated with two cases. The feasibility of experiential teaching approach in senior high school is clearly shown by the analysis of the conditions and the feasibility of the application of the teaching approaches and the difficulty in popularization. Then, the five types of feasible experiential activities—experiencing roles, situation, emotions, practice and creation—and the ways to carry them out in practice are discussed and illustrated with examples. The procedures in which experiential teaching is carried out are based on Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory. Two steps are supplemented to make it more feasible for the English teaching in senior high school in China. So, the process is made up of six steps: the pre-lesson preparation, experiential activities, reflective observation and discussion, practice and consolidation, integration and summary, and after-class tasks. These six steps are demonstrated with a teaching scheme of one lesson—Unit 2, Module 1 Reading: Home Alone—taken from Advance with English. At the stage of experiment, the author carried it out in training students'abilities of reading comprehension. Paired Sample Test is used to analyze the result of the experiment, and the effect of the new approach is shown with tables of statistics and related explanation. Finally, to carry on and improve the teaching in senior high school, new reflections and suggestions are put forward: the relation between the experiential teaching approach and the other teaching approaches, how to design experiential activities properly, how to assess the students'performance and how to combine the new approach with daily teaching, etc.