A Study On Teachers’ Appraisal In Senior High School English Class

Chinese high school students learn English mostly in class, thus as the main media for teachers’classroom teaching, teachers’language plays an essential role in students’ English learning. Teacher s’ appraisal is an important component of teachers’ classroom language, consisting of appraisal on knowledge, ability, and affect. It is the most immediate information communicated by the teacher in class to the student in response to students’ classroom performance, intended to modify their thinking or behavior to improve their learning. It is also one of the most commonly used means by the teacher to interact with the students. According to the New Curriculum Standard, the primary aim of teachers’ appraisal is to help the teacher get a thorough understanding of students’ learning process in order to encourage their learning enthusiasm and promote their all-round development. And the aim can only be achieved by teachers’ effective use of appraisal. Ineffective use of appraisal, on the contrary, will hinder both teachers’ teaching and students’ learning.For a long time, the stress of reforms on senior high school English teaching and learning has been put on teaching contents and methods. Because teachers generally pay more attention to students’ academic achievements, their appraisal is more concerned with students’ grasp of knowledge rather than with their affect in learning. Such kind of appraisal would, in the long run, cause students to lose interest in learning English. Therefore, how to improve senior high school English teachers’ appraisal has become a top priority in research on senior high school English teaching.The research combined the methods of literature review, class observation, questionnaire and interview. The researcher observed altogether 39 classes by 30 teachers from Shenyang Railway Experimental High School and other schools, gave out questionnaires and interviewed teachers and students, in order to find out the problems in high school English teachers’ use of appraisal in class, the reasons for the problems and corresponding solutions.The research questions include:1. Problems in high school English teachers’use of appraisal in class; 2. reasons for the problems; 3. solutions to the existing problems and suggestions for improving teachers’appraisal.The research has arrived at the following conclusions:1. There exist mainly three problems with teachers’ appraisal in senior high English class:too much focus on knowledge, superficiality of the content of appraisal and lack of variation in the form of appraisal; 2. Reasons for the problems mainly consist in teachers’ misconception and lack of awareness of self-improvement; 3. Solutions:First, teachers should abide by the principles designated by the New Curriculum; second, they should learn more forms and techniques of appraisal.