A Comparative Study On Perceptions Of English Teachers’ Mediation Between Senior High School Teachers And Students

The role of English teacher has been a hot and lasting topic in foreign language teaching field. And it has a great impact on classroom interaction mode and students’ learning effects. Researchers nowadays draw more attention to teachers role as mediator, which was based on its theory of social interactionism. In Lev Vygosky’s“zone of proximate development” theory(1978), there exists a significant person helping students move from the present level to the next higher level. Feuerstein(1980) defines these significant figures as mediators and put forward twelve key features of mediation. What’s more, with the New Curriculum put forward in 2001 and the reform in College Entrance Examination, they put higher demand on senior high school’s English teaching. Cultivating senior high school students’ integrative ability of using language has become the main focus in present senior school English classroom. Therefore, senior school English teachers should change their traditional roles of knowledge transmitter and implement more mediation roles.For decades, the majority of the researches on teachers mediation role have been carried out in universities or vocational college in the form of classroom observation,but few focus on senior schools using questionnaire. This study is conducted among160 senior school students and 30 senior school English teachers in Leping Middle School and Leping No.3 Middle School of Jiangxi Province to investigate senior school English teachers mediation. The questionnaire is designed by Marion Williams and Robert L. Burden(2000). The statistical analysis is conducted by SPSS 16.0,which includes: Firstly, descriptive statistics is employed to reveal the generally situation of English teachers’ and students’ perceptions on the importance of English teachers’ mediation, and English teachers’ actual practice of mediation were also investigated. Secondly, Independent sample t-test is conducted to find out the possible significant differences between English teachers’ perceptions and students’ perceptions in terms of the importance of English teachers’ mediation; Thirdly, paired simple t-test will be carried out to examine whether there exist significant differences between English teachers’ perceptions and their actual teaching practice regarding the twelve mediation features.The present research has yielded the following findings:1. Both teachers and students from these two schools have realized the importance of teachers’ mediation. Among the twelve mediation features, both teachers and students regard “shared intention”, “a sense of competence”, and“control of own behavior” as the most three important items.2. Significant differences between teachers’ and students’ perceptions on the importance of mediation exist in “purpose beyond the here and now”, “individuality”,“a sense of belonging”, and there is no statistical significant differences in other 9mediation features.3. Teachers’ actual practice on mediation is weaker than their beliefs about the importance of it. And there were significant differences between the teachers’ perceptions and their actual practice on all the twelve mediation features.Some implications have been drawn from the results of the study for Senior school English teaching. Based on these results, this thesis also provides some suggestions for the execution of mediation in actual teaching process.