Investigation Of Humanistic Education In Senior High School English Teaching And Improvement Strategies

The development direction of China’s current education reform is supposed to promote quality education, with the core to cultivate learners’ humanistic quality. Ordinary high school English curriculum standards (experimental) (2003:3) clearly states, "The emotion of students should be attached importance and their sense of humanities must be enhanced." It is universally acknowledged that we should pay attention to learners’ humanistic cultivation in English teaching of senior high school. Based on this point, the paper sets forth a comprehensive research of humanistic education in senior high school and attempts an investigation of the current situation in this respect and the relative suggestions concerning improvement strategies.Language is a social phenomenon unique to humans. Liu Runqing (1999:54) points out that the essence of language has a soul, and the soul of the language lies in the content. It is self-evident that foreign language teaching in senior High school has multiple humanistic and social significance (2003:1). English teaching goes beyond language learning to include imparting cultural and spiritual heritage. Scholars have researched the relationship between English teaching and humanities. They aim at promoting the effective implementation of cultivating learners’ humanities in senior high schools.This thesis is to investigate the humanistic education in English Teaching of senior high schools through analyzing the humanities elements of new curriculum standard and the current English textbooks under the concept of new curriculum reform, classroom observations, as well as questionnaires and interviews of high school English teachers and students. The results show that quite a few current English classes have attached more importance to humanistic education, reflecting the English curriculum standards to some extent. However, due to the main evaluation method----exam, English classes still could not escape the negative effects of exam-oriented education. NMET, as an ending assessment, doesn’t include enough humanity-oriented tests, Due to its limitations, NMET fails to arouse enough attention from teachers to humanistic education in high school English class, and the students’enthusiasm to learn humanities has not been fully mobilized.In summary, humanistic education in English teaching of senior high school does not meet the relevant standards in new curriculum standard. To promote further implementation of humanities education, we need to research from the teaching materials, teaching arrangements, teachers and learners’cognitive perspective, but also we should increase humanities test gravity in NMET, and to further integrate the formative assessment in NMET system in order to facilitate the positive backwash effect to humanistic education in English teaching of senior high school.