A Study On The Establishment And Realization Ofenglish Classroom Objectives In Senior High School

In contemporary China, “deaf and dumb” English and “examination-oriented” English are still the problems which have puzzled the public in English teaching of secondary school. The latest reform plan for college entrance examination points out that English will still be the subject of unified national college entrance examination, but students will be able to take the exam twice a year and then have their best score used as the valid examination score. A series of problems and English reform require English teachers in secondary school to rethink educational objective. Educational objective is a vital part of teaching, and it has an impact on other factors in teaching. The establishment of educational objective plays a decisive role in achieving the overall goal of English education. A study of the establishment and realization of English educational objectives in secondary school can help teachers rethink about educational objective problem, and it is a necessity of reform in education. There is a long tradition of studying educational objectives. Since 1956 when Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives(the original version) was published, it has attracted widespread attention and has been applied widely. In 2001, the theory was revised(the revised version) and it has taken in the research results of modern cognitive psychology. The use of two-dimensional taxonomy table in analyzing current situation of English classroom objectives and corresponding teaching activities can clearly reflect such problems as “What is expected to teach?”, “What is expected to learn?” and correlation of objectives and activities.This research adopts literature reading to go over previous studies on educational objectives. Through carefully reading the new English Curriculum Standard, which was issued by Ministry of Education in 2001, the paper tends to analyze the establishment of overall educational objectives of English teaching in high school. In the empirical study, the author collects 36 teaching plans designed by high school English teachers as research subjects, and analyzes objectives and teaching activities therein those teaching plans by adopting the two-dimensional taxonomy table in the revision. It aims to answer the following three questions: Firstly, what are English teachers’ classroom educational objectives in senior high school, and how do they establish those objectives? Secondly, what do teachers do to realize teaching objectives? Thirdly, are objectives and teaching activities coherent?The major findings are as follows: Firstly, the majority of English teachers in high school have the awareness of teaching objectives. They establish objectives based on many factors. They emphasize “remembering” factual knowledge, “understanding” conceptual knowledge, and “applying” procedural knowledge, while meta-cognitive knowledge, “analyzing”, “evaluating” and “creating” cognitive processes are less regarded as classroom objectives. Meta-cognitive knowledge is a long-term objective. “Analyzing”, “evaluating” and “creating” are higher cognitive processes, which are usually considered as methods of helping the achievement of lower educational objectives. In addition, the vagueness of verbs in statements of objectives implicates that teachers might not attach much attention to students’ cognitive process. Meanwhile, some teachers cannot distinguish between objectives and process(teaching activities). The impact on students might be that students can answer the question “what did you do in class?”, while they cannot answer the question “what did you learn in class?” Secondly, it is found out that “remembering factual knowledge” is always achieved by repeating and retelling, “understanding conceptual knowledge” often uses positive examples and counter examples to deepen students’ comprehension, and that “applying procedural knowledge” often needs to construct a flow chat in students’ mind. Thirdly, objectives and teaching activities enjoy a high level coherence, but in some cases objectives do not have corresponding activities.The limitation of this study is that data collected may not be large enough to include all situations of English teachers’ objectives, and that the classification of objectives might be subjective. In spite of this, the study still provides some valuable information about the current situation of English teachers’ educational objectives, and sheds light on the application of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives.