A Narrative Inquiry Into The Impacts Of Teachers’ Listening And Expectation In Primary English Class On Underachievers

In the late1980s, a reform movement was conducted in English teaching. Teachers teaching English expected to change the traditional "teacher-centred" mode to the "student-centred" one which set quality-education as the main purpose of English course and adopted humanism as the principle of language teaching. In such a situation, the principal role of students in English class teaching has been stressed and advanced in the past thirty years. Problems about students, however, still exist, one of which is problems about students with learning disability or underachievers.Most students in an English class do not experience major learning problems. A significant percentage of students, however, do encounter academic difficulties or learning problems in language learning. This group of students, in EFL class, are usually defined as underachievers. The existence of underachievers in English class is a practical problem that an English teacher has to meet with and deal with. At present, this problem still exists and makes a negative impact on effective English teaching and on those special students’development in an all-round way.Many teachers have also taken a certain amount of measures to carry out many methods in their teaching, especially applying to underachievers. However, those methods have not attained their ideal effect. Judging from the existing research results, teacher’s listening and teacher’s expectation have a positive impact on students’ academic, mental, physical and other development. This study will concentrate on the two methods, teacher’s listening and teacher’s expectation, which teachers can use to help underachievers to achieve self-development in their English learning.The nature of this study is exploratory and interpretative, so qualitative method is adopted. In order to present the learning situation of the two underachievers when they receive different teacher’s listening and expectation, narrative inquiry will be adopted in the data collection. The study will solve two problems within teacher’s transforming underachievers by listening and expectation:(1) After receiving different strategies of teacher’s listening and expectation, what changes take place on the performance of underachievers in English class?(2) What is the impact of the teacher’s proper expectation and listening on underachievers? Two English teachers and two special students in their class join in this study. The main research methods are narrative inquiry and observation. There are three stages in this study. The first stage is literature review. In this stage, through referring to abundant literature, the author will give a certain definition of underachievers, which will present a clear direction for me to choose research subjects. Then in this stage, by reviewing the predecessor’s research, some conclusions will be drawn on the relationship and meaning of teacher’s listening and expectation for underachievers’development on learning ability. According to these findings, the study develops its research questions.The second stage is the research implementation and data collection. The last stage is findings and paper writing. The further aim of the study is to apply the findings from case study to general application in EFL class to help underachievers to achieve breakthroughs in English learning.