| Abstract:In the teaching practice in China today, there appears a trend of reform in the English teaching modes and methods. However, in the curriculum design, teachers pay more attention to the classroom teaching and practice than to homework design.In fact, homework as well as classroom teaching plays an important part in the English teaching. At the same time, it is common that the class size is too big and very few students have a solid foundation in English in the countryside. In this situation, teachers usually have to cater for most of the students, letting them reach different learning goals and accomplish different tasks at the same time no matter what level they are at. The top students often find it so easy to finish it so that they think the teacher’s teaching is not useful and therefore lose their interests in English learning. In order to solve this problem, there is a great need to assign hierarchical homework in a scientific and reasonable way.According to their levels of English and the degrees of difficulty in homework, the writer got approval and cooperation from these students in advance and divided the students into three groups by the principle of hierarchy (The groups were called level A, B, and C respectively) and assigned hierarchical homework to students in her class accordingly. It is found that when the hierarchical tasks fitted the students at different English proficiency levels, it worked well. The students learn more for it promoted them to participate more actively in their English learning, especially the top and weaker students have benefited more by doing hierarchical homework. It also can arouse the students’interest in learning English, change their attitudes, help them get better grades, and also make more students finish their homework more efficiently. In this experiment, one of the classes taught by the author is the experimental class with hierarchical homework, the other is the control group taught with the traditional teaching method. In5months, the author conducts two questionnaires with the students from the two groups and analyzes the results of two examinations. The result indicates that hierarchical homework plays a positive part in enhancing students’ learning interests in English and improving the efficiency of their homework. Moreover, the author also provides specific cases of hierarchical homework design and make a thorough analysis of them, with the purpose of proposing some useful suggestions for junior middle school hierarchical homework design which can make students improve their homework efficiency, and as a result helping all the students make greatest progress in their study.The thesis is divided into eight parts. The first part mainly introduces the research background and explains some related concepts. The second part mainly clarifies the basic theory of hierarchical English homework design based on the pedagogic theories, psychology and the course reform. The third part is the literature review of hierarchical English homework design. The fourth part mainly talks about research methods. The fifth is about the process of the experiment, including preparations, significance of research and specific methods of it. The sixth part shows three cases of hierarchical English homework design and classroom manipulation. The seventh reaches the experimental conclusion based on the analysis of the experimental data. The last part is the conclusion of the whole paper. |
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