A Comparative Study Of Teaching Effectiveness Between Urban And Rural Junior Middle School English Classes Of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region

Effective teaching is an ancient as well as modern topic for both teachers and educational scholars all over the world. The Chinese curriculum reform beginning from this early century, has also aimed to practice more effective teaching for students’well development. Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region is one of the first experimental provinces of the reform. Then how has the reform been going on after more than a decade? How different is the teaching effectiveness between urban and rural junior middle schools? The thesis is a comparative research of teaching effectiveness between urban and rural junior middle school English classes of Ningxia through classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews on seven of the most important elements of classroom teaching.With contrastive analysis after the individual-samples t test performed by SPSS19.0, the research suggested the following findings:(1) teaching objectives, especially on emotional aspect in both urban and rural junior middle schools tend to be overlooked;(2) urban English classes are likely to have more substantial and practical teaching content than rural English class. Besides, rural classes pay two much attention to reading without having an equal development of speaking, listening and writing;(3) urban and rural English classes have significant difference in teaching methods. Generally urban teachers are able to use various teaching processes while most rural teachers seem to like grammar translation method more;(4) activities or interaction is seldom observed in rural English classes but a great many do exist in urban ones;(5) good language habits are not always observed in both urban and rural junior middle school English classes;(6) for classroom management, urban schools’ class time is likely to be over-used but rural classes’ over-left; in addition, there lacks a harmonious environment in both the classrooms;(7) the data also suggest a significant difference between urban and rural English classes on teaching effect from both the students and the observer’s perspectives:urban English classes tend to be more effective. In spite of this fact, both urban and rural students have higher expectation towards their English teaching effectiveness.Based on the discussion and analysis of the investigation results, tentative conclusions are drawn and implications particularly from urban and rural English teachers’ teaching perspective are presented. The limitations and recommendations have also been pointed out for further research.