Research On The Effective Designing Of English Assignment In Rural Junior High School

Along with the advancement of New Curriculum Reform, English New CurriculumStandards for Junior Middle School, promulgated by the Chinese Ministry of Education in2001, comes up with the idea that the overall goal of the English New Curriculum Standardsin elementary educational stage is to cultivate the students’ abilities of comprehensivelanguage application. The New Curriculum Standards ask teachers to arrange students’ studyand activities systematically and guide students to complete the study and improve theirpragmatic competence of foreign language by perceiving, experiencing, practicing,anticipating and cooperating. Instead of transferring knowledge in one direction, teachers arealso required to embrace students with happiness and help them study successfully. Englishassignment is an important part of classroom teaching, being the supplement of classroomteaching.Therefore, the English assignment should promote the development of students. But a lotof junior high school English teachers give students assignment like reciting, copying, andrepeated exercise and so on. Mechanical memorization and dull written assignment bringabout some bad effects, such as students hating English assignment and losing interest inlearning English. So how to change students’ attitude of “I am asked to” into “I want to” is atopic for teachers to consider.In light of literature review and previous achievements at home and abroad, the author,taking some students and teachers in Hei Yangshan High School as subjects, did aninvestigation and interview according to the current conditions of English assignments’ design.The results show that there exist some typical problems in the current design of Englishassignments in junior high schools. For instance, too many assignments are left to students, and assignments are much too easy. What’s worse, the contents are as sharp as a marble andoral assignments are lacking. The list could go on and on etc. Students and teachers made adiscussion in terms of the purpose, form and content, quantity and difficulty of assignmentsrespectively in this interview. Most students and teachers have realized the necessity ofreform for English assignments and they put forward some teaching measures for theseproblems.In an effort to foster students’ ability of applying English in practice and meet the needsof the five curriculum goals, the author designed three principles of English assignment basedon others researches and students’ characteristics, which are the combination of enjoymentand applicability; the combination of typicality and comprehensiveness and the combinationof hierarchy and selectivity. At the end of the thesis, the author brought forward a fewsuggestions while designing English assignment. Therefore, it is hoped that this researchcould provide some samples for English teachers to design English assignments in junior highschool. In this way, the teachers could improve their English teaching levels in practice andarouse students’ enthusiasm for learning English in the future.