Application Study Of Covertly Stratified English Teaching In Senior High School

In the recent years, city senior high schools are experiencing the reform of enrollment expansion, which objectively contributes to the occurrences of different levels of English learning among students. Apart from this, students are quite different in some subjective factors, such as backgrounds, personal characters, mental conditions, study habits, learning methods and strategies, learning competence and so on, which help to widen the gap of English competence among students. Therefore, teachers should try to carry out the principle of teaching according to the students'abilities to satisfy students'individualized English learning, and on the other hand, teachers also need to take students'strong self-awareness into consideration and protect their self-respect. The traditional teaching methods should be changed to ensure satisfactory teaching results. Based on the above factors and consideration, the author tried an experiment of covertly stratified English teaching.Covertly stratified English teaching is a kind of teaching, in which teachers covertly group students into three levels– A, B and C, based on students'abilities, intelligence, interest and potentialities in study. Then in class, teaching goals, designs, guidance and evaluation on students are also grouped to meet different needs of students who are of different levels and have different English competence.According to the principle of teaching students in accordance with their aptitude, with the guidance of the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development in the Constructivism and the Needs Analysis, an application research on covertly stratified English teaching was carried out in Danyang Lv Shuxiang Senior High School from March, 2010 to March, 2011, with Class 15 of Grade Two being chosen as the experiment group while Class 17 of Grade Two as the control group. The year-long research compares the method of covertly stratified teaching with the traditional method about their effects on students'learning interest and initiatives, academic grades and teacher-student relationships. The results of this research show that covertly stratified English teaching is beneficial to students in the above-mentioned aspects of learning interest, academic grades and teacher-student relationship.