Research On The Status Quo Of English Postgraduates’ Class Presentation

In recent years, Chinese English postgraduates’ education has been expanding substantially, with its number growing and its cultivation methods becoming more and more varied. However, the contradiction between the growing number of English postgraduates and the unsatisfactory quality of English postgraduates is more and more obvious. How to coordinate the enrollment and the quality is an important issue waiting to be solved in current English postgraduates’ education.As an important part of English postgraduates’ education, classroom teaching is the key to quality improvement, and the adoption of an appropriate teaching method is of vital importance. Nowadays, student-centered class presentation is been widely used in English postgraduates’education and it has been much investigated and discussed by foreign and domestic scholars (e.g. Magin & Helmore,2001; Hinks,2005; Kerby & Romine,2009; Kuzma,2011;杨贝,2006; 牟群月,2008;周杏莉,2010;王爱勇,2011; 巩向飞,孙晓霞,2012;李川,2013). However, the author finds that the subjects of previous research are mostly high school or non-English college students while few of them are English postgraduates. As the latter has some distinctive characteristics and plays a more and more important role in current international communication, this research aims to investigate the status quo of English postgraduates’class presentation by the use of questionnaire and semi-structured interview. The research subjects are 250 English postgraduates from Central China Normal University. The research questions are as follows:(1) How do English postgraduates perceive the current mode of class presentation?(2) What are the factors that enhance students’class presentation?(3) What are the drawbacks of current class presentation? And what are the possible ways to deal with them?It was found that most of the English postgraduates were positive towards the adoption of class presentation and it has influenced their academic studies, research abilities, language skills, emotions and interpersonal relations positively. Some students also expressed that class presentation had some positive impacts on their teaching skills. Besides, the current class presentation has many merits, which were highly acclaimed by the students. However, some drawbacks related to the presentation environment, the teacher and the students still exist in current class presentation. Based on the results of this research, some suggestions on how to make class presentation better play its roles were given.This research can hopefully provide the school authority, the teacher and the students with a whole picture of class presentation, so that they can make their own contributions to overcoming the drawbacks existing in current class presentation, thus enabling class presentation to better serve English postgraduates’ education.