An Investigation Of English Teaching Environment In Rural Secondary Schools

Chinese English education has produced a lot of talents and gainedremarkable accomplishments in contributing national reform and opening.Problems remain although reforms never cease. Some problems involve Englisheducation itself such as textbook, teaching method and so on; others are aboutsocial factors in which English education is embedded. This includes theimportance of English in learners’ social life，local education investment，learners’ or their parents’ attitudes towards English education or school educationand the like. Things are worse in rural areas. Because of Chinese dualistic systemthe main public resources go to cities. As a result, the gap between urban andrural areas is widened increasingly. Also changes have taken place in ruralsociety in recent years. Rural and urban English education develops in verydifferent social contexts.However, uniform curriculum, teaching theory and methods which serve forcity English education are employed in rural areas. All this neglects therealities of rural educational environment, teachers and learners. So rural teachersare tired of teaching and learners are tired of learning. English teaching is a wasteof time and efforts and is inefficient. The overall rural English teaching has notgot better although reforms have never ceased. The English education reformitself is insufficient to solve the problems in rural English education.The paper reviews the history of English teaching theories and methodsbriefly and a conclusion is drawn that English teaching method itself isinsufficient to improve English education in rural context. English teachingmethods pay more attention to technical aspects but little to concrete rural teacherand learner groups. As we all know，environment shapes persons. We should payattention to environmental factors in which English education takes place. Afterpointing out rural English education problems or dilemmas the paper analyzes the reasons in terms of environment such as school environment, learners’ familyenvironment, and social environment.Local rural culture is the soul of local teacher, learner and other environmentfactors. A deeper cause of the backward English education in rural areas is thatlocal farmers have been poor for such a long time that they have graduallydeveloped and finally accepted a poverty culture. The poverty culture occurs as aresult of the adaption to poor life. Poverty culture refers to a particular way of life.It involves behavior patterns, habits, custom, psychological set model, lifeattitude and values, thus exerting a negative impact on rural learners’ Englishlearning. It greatly limits poor men’s view, ambition, and improvement. Up tonow， poverty culture is seldom taken into consideration in rural Englisheducation researches. The paper tries to analyses rural English teaching in viewof poverty culture.Therefore, this paper centers on the study of the realistic rural contexts ofEnglish teaching in the hope of achieving attention of researchers who mayfurther their researches for the sake of the poor rural communities. After all, theyaccount for more than half of our whole population.