| Compared with other teaching activities, homework has been a neglected area.Despite the fact that some experts in foreign countries have discussed the topic of homework, few of them took special attention to English homework. In China, the researches on English homework is fewer. Most of the researches on English homework in China focus on the relationship between English homework time and English academic achievements and that between amount of English homework and English academic achievements. The quality of English homework has been neglected.Therefore, this paper presents a case study aiming at the reform of English homework in senior high schools in Shanghai and exploring the effectiveness of multiple English homework on senior high school students’ English academic achievements.Three research questions were addressed in this study: 1) What are the problems in current English homework? 2) How should English homework be designed to improve homework motivation ? 3) Whether the multiple English homework is effective to students’ academic achievements? Based on the three research questions,the research was carried out by the means of students’ questionnaire, teachers’ interview, and experiment. 41 senior high school students in High School Affiliated to Shanghai Normal University were chosen as the subjects and 3 English teachers at that school as the interviewees. The data collected from students’ questionnaires and experiment were analyzed by SPSS 16.0. The data from teachers’ interview were dealt with in the way of the analysis of qualitative data. For the data from questionnaire,Cronbach α was used to test the reliability and factor analysis used to test the validity of the questionnaire. For the data from experiment, paired t-test was used to explore the effectiveness of multiple English homework.The main findings of this research are 1) the problems of present English homework are students’ exam-oriented purpose to do homework, the monotonous form and content of English homework, students’ lack of intrinsic motivation, and English teachers’ overweight dependence on workbook. 2) the senior high school students expect their English teachers can design English homework by themselves.Their preferred English homework is task-based homework, interactive homework,and computer-assisted homework. These kinds of English homework can evoke students’ intrinsic motivation. 3) the experiment result shows that there is a significantdifference between pre-test and post-tests which means that the multiple English homework does work, and it is effective to improve senior high school students’ English academic achievements. Therefore, it can be concluded that the present English homework should be reformed, and the form and content of English homework should be multiple which is preferred by students. The multiple English homework, namely task-based English homework, interactive English homework, and computer-assisted English homework should be used to help improve students’ English academic achievements. |
PDF Full Text Request