A Comparative Study On English Teaching Activities Implemented By Middle School In-service Teachers And Pre-service Teachers

Teaching activity is one of the hot topics in foreign language teaching research. The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has received the most widespread attention since the1970s. As the academic term of CLT, teaching activity displays abundant meanings and influences students’attitudes to language. Rich classroom-oriented studies have been found mostly to be the qualitative researches, but few of them are designed to be the quantitative one. In other words, the quantitative researches investigating the English teaching activities in the classroom remain to be of significance and novelty.The dissertation conducts a comparative study on the teaching activities within a total of23video-taped classes given by14in-service teachers and9pre-service teachers. The former group of samples are the contestants from the First Teaching Skills Contest for Guangxi Junior Middle School Teachers (English). The latter group of samples are the contestants of the Second Teaching Skills Contest for Normal University Students of Guangxi (Junior English). Adopted the Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation instrument proposed by Patrick Allen, Maria Frohlich and Nina Spada, the study gets important data, which are analyzed on the basis of the former studies on teaching activities, theories of Communicative Language Teaching, and Second Language Acquisition.In the study, the23video classes are being carefully observed and taken down the teaching procedures and their time allotment. Then the teaching activities are identified in each lesson according to the operational definition. The comparisons of teaching activities are made between the in-service and pre-service teachers in terms of the activity type, the participation organization, the contents, student modality and the supporting materials. The study shows that in-service and pre-service teachers share similarities and differences in several aspects, some conclusions can be drawn as followings:1) In terms of activity type, in-service teachers are more likely to organize different kinds of activities in a more reasonable ratio and well distribute the class time than pre-service teachers;2) In terms of participation organization, in-service teachers organize smaller proportion of whole-class work and group work, but larger proportion of individual work than pre-service teachers;3) In terms of teaching contents, in-service teachers lay more emphasis on the formal use of language, while pre-service teachers on the functional use; pre-service teachers are more likely to choose the broad ranges of topics and share the topic control with students;4) In terms of students modality, in-service teachers are more likely to integrate different skills into different types of lesson;5) In terms of supporting materials, pre-service teachers care more about the variety of materials used in the activities.At the end of the thesis, some implications are put forward for teachers on the design of teaching activities, as well as some recommendations for further study.