Exploration, Secondary High School English Teaching In The English Newspapers

Although English teaching plays a more and more important part in China's education, both teachers and students are still puzzled by the problem that the requirements in Syllabus of English Course in High School are difficult to be met by most students when the textbook is used as the only teaching material in class. With this in mind, the author has done some research on classroom teaching guided with the theory of constructivism in the hope that there might be a better approach to teaching English with journalistic English as supplementary material. Through questionnaires designed for students and teachers respectively in the school where the author is working, the real problem looms that the prevailing teaching material, textbook, is too simple to keep learners interested and updated with the changing world. The findings of the research also illustrate that the situation can be made even worse with the focus on"examination-oriented"system,"textbook-based"teaching, and"teacher-centered"ideology, all of which fail to fuel students'initiative and creativity. Therefore, students, as a main part in learning activity can never be demonstrated fully.With this regard, this paper equipped with constructivism theory attempts to apply six instruction models to English teaching classroom. They are:the scaffolding, the anchored, the random access, the reciprocal, the cooperative learning and the autonomous learning models which are used in teaching listening, speaking, vocabulary, reading and writing respectively. The subjects are junior two students in the middle school attached to East China University of Science and Technology. After one-term of practice accompanied by a series of follow-up tests on the students, the result proves that the teaching models mentioned above are effective and feasible and that English newspapers can assist in English teaching in middle school.The paper contains six chapters altogether. Chapter one introduces the background of the study, the objectives, the methods used in doing the research and the structure of the paper. Chapter two introduces the theory of constructivism and learning methods, and other related theories are mentioned in passing. Chapter three analyzes the current English teaching situation in China's middle schools and reveals the common problems existing in English teaching and learning in terms of students, teachers and schools one by one. Chapter four presents the activities based on teaching models designed by the theory of constructivism both in class and after class. Chapter five relates the process of the teaching experiment through comparing the data collected from the subject group with that of the group where traditional teaching is carried out. And then a conclusion arrives that journalistic English teaching can facilitate English teaching effectively in middle school. Chapter six reflects on the problems appearing in the experiment and suggests a further study on the combination of teaching English newspapers and building web education environment. Of course, the expected objective of how to develop the backward students'self-access ability is also elaborated on.With journalistic English teaching increasingly applied to classroom teaching, its advantages have been appreciated day by day. English newspapers, especially those aimed at high school youths as readers, are low in price, rich in content, simple but updated in language, and colourful in styles. It is a fact that journalistic English teaching can enhance students'enthusiasm for English learning, can enrich teaching resources, can improve students'ability of self-access, can strengthen their consciousness of cross-culture, and can enlarge their vocabulary. Above all, it can better students'performance in listening, speaking, reading and writing.