An Investigation Into Students’ Engagement In Senior Middle School English Classroom Teaching

Students’ engagement is a key factor to classroom teaching and students’ activelyengagement in classroom is a prerequisite for their effective learning. But there arequite few studies related to high school students’ English classroom engagement inthe literature, especially in investigating their classroom behavior engagement,cognitive engagement and emotional engagement from students’ perspective. Thisstudy aims to investigate the current situation of high school students’ engagement inclass, so as to better know their classroom learning environment.The author selected students from two Grade One and two Grade Two classes of asenior middle school in Nanchang as subjects. The research of students’ behaviorengagement, cognitive engagement and emotional engagement start with followingthree questions.(1) What is the current situation of students’ engagement in seniormiddle school English classroom teaching?(2)What is the correlation among thestudents’ behavior engagement, cognitive engagement and emotional engagement inEnglish classroom teaching?(3)Are there any factors (grade, gender) which influencethe students’ behavior engagement, cognitive engagement and emotional engagementrespectively in English classroom teaching?Three major research instruments were used, including students’ engagementquestionnaire, classroom observation and after-class interview. The questionnaire ofstudents’ classroom engagement was first designed by Kong Qiping(2003) and wasrevised according to the purpose of this study. The questionnaire includes three aspects,which are behavior engagement, cognitive engagement and emotional engagement. Thequestionnaire reaches the accepted credibility and validity, for the Cronbach alphais.718and the KMO is.845. The data got from classroom observation and students’interview provides the triangular verification for the questionnaire.The results show that current high school students’ classroom engagement ispositive. Students perform well on behavior engagement (M=2.5658), cognitiveengagement (M=2.8073) and emotional engagement (M=2.8028). The correlation(r=.397, p=.000) between students’ behavior engagement and cognitive engagement isstrongly significant. There is no significant correlation (r=.088, p=.241) betweenstudents’ behavior engagement and emotional engagement. Students’ cognitiveengagement is related to emotional engagement and the correlation (r=.364, p=.000) is significant. There exists the gender differences between boys and girls and thedifferences are statistically significant on two components (interest and success)(p=.003; p=.001) of emotional engagement. Girls show more interest and success thanboys in the classroom engagement. The grade differences between Grade One andGrade Two are statistically significant among two components (being attentive takinglessons and intensive study)(p=.009; p=.000) of behavior engagement, onecomponent (high-level strategy)(p=.004) of cognitive engagement, and twocomponents (interest and tiredness)(p=.008; p=.003) of emotional engagement.Compared with Grade Two students, Grade One students perform better on beingattentive taking lessons and intensive study. Grade One students are better in usinghigh-level strategies on their English study. Grade One students have more interestand less tiredness in learning English in the classroom.In response to these results, teachers should design flexible course content toreduce students’ classroom engaging difficulties in future teaching and they need tofoster students’ learning strategy to make them know how to efficient engage in theclassroom learning. In addition, they have responsibility to create a good classroomenvironment for students so as to lower their classroom engaging tiredness and arousetheir interests in English learning. At last, teachers need to provide more interactiveopportunities for students and make them actively engage in classroom teaching.