The Application Of Multiple Intelligences Theory To Primary School English Teaching

At the beginning and the foundation stage of Leaning English, English teaching in primary school will play a crucial role in students’English Leaning interests, leaning methods and leaning abilities. In2001, the English curriculum standard was issued by China’s Ministry of Education. From then on, English should be a required course in primary school. The overall goal of the new English curriculum standard is to train the students’comprehensive language ability. It can be clearly seen that the idea of the standards is in accord with the essence of multiple intelligences (MI) theory. In1983, Dr. Howard Gardner, a distinguished American cognitive psychologist, put forward the multiple intelligences theory. The key of this theory shows that all the normal human beings have at least eight different kinds of intelligences, intelligent expressions of everyone are different, each person use different intelligences every day unconsciously, and will make full use of their strong intelligence to learn, so this theory emphasizes the teacher should stimulate students’interest according to different types of intelligence and the students’different learning styles, make use of students’strong intelligences to learn, so that each student can achieve a comprehensive and balanced development. In this paper, taking Xinyang Industrial City Primary School as an example, from the teaching practice angle, the author will explore how to arouse the students’interest in learning and carry out the primary school better, so that students can master basic knowledge of English and listening,speaking, reading, writing skills, to cultivate students’observations, memories, thinking abilities and innovations etc.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the study, this chapter discuss the present problems existing in the primary school English teaching and the demanding of the English New Curriculum Standards. Then the purpose and significance of research will be stressed, the research contents and methods will be described. Finally two research questions will be tested.Chapter two is the literature review. In this chapter, the researches on MI theory abroad and in China are provided. After that, the influences of multiple intelligences theory on English teaching are presented.Chapter Three the brief introduction of multiple intelligences theory is first introduced, then describes the applications of multiple intelligences theory on English teaching in primary school, which involves students, teacher, and evaluation system.Chapter four is the focus of this thesis. In this part, in order to put theories into practice for primary English teacher, the paper firstly discuss how to use various teaching ways to develop students’multiple intelligences and then makes a survey of applying MI to English teaching in primary schools. Based on that, the paper offers different means of applying MI to teaching English listening, speaking, reading, writing, pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar in primary school. At the same time, it provides several teaching plans to show the specific application of the theory to English teaching in primary schools. At last is the conclusive analysis of the case study. The influence of the application of multiple intelligence theory on teachers, the teaching process and the students will be discussed.Chapter Five is the conclusion. The advantages of the application of multiple intelligences theory to English teaching in primary school will be presented. At the same time, the limitations have also been pointed out so that further empirical study can be improved and other researchers who are interested in this topic can get inspiration.