An Investigation Into Students’ Perceptions Of English Classroom Environment Of Higher Education

Classroom environment research is of great importance to education field and ithas received much attention from educational researchers. Regarding the literatureresearch, it spans a few decades and the number of it is extensive, a substantialamount of which have been related to students’ perceptions of classroom environment,studying what makes students perceive classroom environment differently and howdifferent factors affect students’ perceptions. However, few pre-existing studies homepay concern to whether school environment would be a variable contributing tostudents’ different perceptions of classroom environment. Therefore, research on theinfluences of school environment on students’ perceptions of classroom environmentis quite necessary for us to understand more details of how to improve Englishclassroom environment.The present study on classroom environment is on the basis of Lewin’sPsychodynamics Field, with an attempt to explain students’ behaviors in class to be aninteraction by students and their classroom environment. Comprehensive collegeEnglish classroom environment instrument, CCECEI for short, was made referenceto acquire quantitative data on classroom environment for the study. The instrumentassessed the English classroom environment from nine aspects, i.e. StudentCohesiveness, Teacher Support, Involvement, Task Orientation, Cooperation, Equity,Student Responsibility, Leadership and Innovation.448non-English-major freshmenboth, nearly half of them from a vocational college and half from a normal university,13majors in total, were selected as the subjects in the empirical study of this paper.Each subject completed the questionnaire and the questionnaire data were processedby SPSS16.0. The quantitative design provided abundant information to analyzewhether gender difference and school environment can be significant factors to affecttheir perceptions of English classroom environment. This study attempted to probeinto:1) students’ general perceptions of English classroom environment of highereducation;2) students’ perception differences between male students and femalestudents in their English classroom environment;3) students’ perception differencesbetween different types of school in English classroom environment.According to the investigation, several findings have been summed up.1)English classroom environment were relatively positive in higher education on the whole.2) Female students had more favorable perceptions of English classroomenvironment than males. Taken the subjects of two selected schools as a whole, it wasfound that female students and male students thought their English classroomenvironment on Teacher Support, Task Orientation, Cooperation, StudentResponsibility and Leadership remarkably different.3) Vocational college studentshad higher perception scores than university students on all scales of CCECEI. Somestatistically significant students’ perception differences related to different schoolenvironments were found in such aspects as Teacher Support, Involvement,Cooperation, Leadership and Innovation.This study assessed English classroom environment in the perspective ofstudents’ perception and it leaves many implications to the field of classroomenvironment. First, schools should think about building a causal teacher-studentrelationship and a mutual enhancing teacher-teacher relationship, setting a goal ofimproving students’ comprehensive abilities and balanced gender ratios of classes andcreating an atmosphere of encouraging innovative steps by teachers. Second, teacherstreat students of different academic levels, of different genders, of different degrees ofparticipation equally, providing them with enough supports. Besides, they shouldimprove the practical function of knowledge to be conveyed to students and try toimprove their professional abilities to be someone dependable for students by theirown efforts or with the help of colleagues. Third, students should be on good termswith their classmates, take more responsibilities and make efforts to strength theircooperation while studying.