An Empirical Study On Senior High School English Classroom Psychological Environment That The Learners Actively Participate In

Classroom is the main place of formal school education，which has great impact onstudents’ learning performance. That is especially true for Chinese learners in the specialcontext of English teaching in China; the English classroom is the most important channel forlanguage input, whose environment directly affects the student’s language learning. Generallyspeaking, classroom environment includes the physical environment and psychologicalenvironment. The physical environment refers to the hardware condition in the classroom,such as decoration of the classroom and the multimedia facilities; the psychological classroomenvironment is a potential soft environment, which is created by teachers and studentstogether in the classroom teaching process. It is true that this atmosphere exerts a subtleinfluence for students’ cognition, emotion, and behavior in classroom language acquisitionprocess. Since the promulgation of the New Curriculum Reform in basic education, greatemphasis was placed on people-oriented and the cultivation of students’ attitudes. Althoughthe New Curriculum Reform has been implemented for many years, high school students’learning attitudes are still so passive that majority of students could not actively participate inall aspects of English teaching and learning.This study thus takes the engagement theory and social constructivism theory as thetheoretical basis and makes attempt to inquire into how to construct the classroompsychological environment that contributes to students’ active participation in senior highschool English classroom. The study adopts both quantitative and qualitative researchmethodology, which include classroom observation, questionnaire, and interview. Theresearch was conducted in the following steps: firstly, the author carried out one-monthclassroom observation during the early days of her teaching practice in NO.2high school ofPanshan in Panjin City, Liaoning Province. This observation lays the foundation for thefollowing questionnaire design; secondly, the author designed the questionnaire with the helpof synthesizing and analyzing the dimensions of some studies about classroom environment athome and abroad as well as the data derived from the classroom observation. Then accordingto the pilot test results, the author made some modifications. The final version of thequestionnaire is made up of6scales and32items; thirdly, from October8,2013to January22,2014, the author collected the samples from the high school where she conducted the teachingpractice and other five schools in her hometown, Jincheng, Shanxi Province. In order to meetthe needs of investigation, the author chose580students in all as subjects, and finally580 questionnaires were collected, with560found to be valid. The data were analyzed with SPSS19.0; fourthly, in accordance with the problems that reflected from the data analysis, theauthor interviewed12students who have all participated in the previous questionnaire surveyand8English teachers, for the purpose of understanding teachers and students’ inner thoughtand emotional state in in-depth study. The information collected from the interviews wassynthesized and categorized for further analysis.In a word, through detailed analysis of quantitative and qualitative research, this studyyielded the major findings. This study found out the existing problems that impact thestudents’ participation in the classroom psychological environment. These problems include:the classroom atmosphere is not harmonious or pleasant; the smooth communication betweenthe teacher and students can not be ensured; teaching method lacks diversity, etc. Finally,based on the research findings, the author put forward some relevant strategies and measuresto solve these problems, aiming at optimizing the English classroom psychologicalenvironment. For example, teachers should have legitimate expectations of their students;teachers should be sincere and patient; teachers should recognize each student’s learning styleas well as their various personality traits and be equal to each of them; strengthen the teachingskills and teaching art to stimulate students’ participation initiative in the English class. It ishoped that this study will shed light on high school English teaching in terms of encouragingstudents to actively participate in classroom activities in senior high school.