An Investigation On Inquiry Teaching In Senior High Schools In Chi-ping County

National English Curriculum Standards for Common Senior High School advocates to develop students’ ability of autonomous learning, cooperative learning and inquiry learning, as well as to promote students’ character development. Inquiry teaching conforms to the requirements of the new curriculum reform, for it pays attention to problem solving and emphasizes exploration, putting students in a learning situation of language communication and cooperation, aiming to develop the students’ ability of independent learning, cooperative learning, inquiring spirit and innovation consciousness.Different from traditional method which emphasizes knowledge teaching, inquiry teaching places great emphasis on the process of acquiring knowledge and application of knowledge to solve problems. It also transforms the learning process from passive knowledge acceptance to active knowledge inquiry. By actively participating in the teaching process, students can cultivate their independence, autonomy, cooperative and innovative ability. Thus, it is of great importance in senior high school English teaching.With 30 teachers and 200 students in the three high schools of Chi-ping county chosen as the subjects of the investigation, this research focuses on the investigations of the current situations of inquiry teaching implementation through questionnaires and interviews, analyses on the corresponding data, analyses on the reasons of the existing problems found in the survey, and finally putting forward reasonable suggestions, aiming to make inquiry teaching into better use in high school English teaching.This thesis is made up of five chapters.Chapter one introduces the background, significance and main contents of the research. Chapter two mainly introduces the previous researches both abroad and at home, the theoretical basis and ways to carry out inquiry teaching. Chapter three introduces the aims, principal, evaluation and realization types of inquiry learning in detail and provides a reference for how to carry out inquiry teaching in practice. As the principal parts of the thesis, chapter four tries to find out problems and causes in the perspective of both teachers’ and students’ points of view, which are the understanding and cognitive process of inquiry learning of English teachers, the implementation degree and influential factors of inquiry learning, the application of inquiry learning and the result of inquiry learning implementation. Chapter five is the conclusion, in which improvement strategies in promoting inquiry learning in English teaching in senior high school are put forward and meanwhile limitations of this investigation are considered.