Study On Presupposed And Generative Instruction In Junior High School

Reforms of English teaching in secondary school focus their attention on the development of students’ ability to use language and to think in English. Under this circumstance, the main role of students in classroom English teaching gradually comes to the surface; more attention falls on the features of dynamic and flexibility in classroom teaching. When fits themselves into this new circumstance, researchers and educators in English teaching area have increasingly focused on the study of presupposed and generative instruction.Problems in the currently existing studies of generative or presupposed instruction are there to further discuss: Firstly, a considerable amount of the existing researches concern the theoretical explanation for the relationship of presupposed and generative instruction, a common point in these researches is reflected by the recognition of “presupposition is the premise of generation while generation is the practical reflection of presupposition in the classroom teaching”. However, the author found that not quite a few researches are qualified to illustrate presupposed and generative instruction in practice. Secondly, it is obvious that traditional teaching techniques, to some degree, are hardly to respond the requirement of fostering students’ language ability, which creates opportunities for the generative instruction with dynamic, alive and flexible features and makes it become the attention of educators and researchers. But as for the generative instruction itself, in-class prompt generation which is of small probability to happen, receives much more attention than presupposition-driven generation that is about students’ development of generative thinking and also should be the focus of generative instruction research for its practical nature. Thirdly, still there are insufficient researches concerning what students can benefit from the combination of presupposed and generative instruction instead of just drawing conclusions in teaching strategies for educators. Based on these three problems in the current researches, this thesis tries to inquire about the status quo of presupposed and generative instruction in Junior Three English teaching classroom and to provide constructive recommendations in teaching and learning.Following questions will be answered in this research, 1. What is exactly the relationship between presupposition and generation? 2. In what way can presupposed and generative teaching be matched with each other in junior high school EFL classrooms? 3. What kind of benefits are students able to get from generative and presupposed instruction in junior high school?In this thesis, the author adopts the research instruments including: interview, classroom observation and case study with the according evaluations to ensure the reliability of validity of the research. To begin with, by the interviews with teachers, the author found that all the interviewed teachers get a basic understanding of presupposed and generative instruction and pose positive attitudes towards them in teaching, but some of them were obviously lacking of necessary training and practice of presupposed and generative instruction. Meanwhile, the author also found by classroom observation that the focus of presupposed and generative research should be generative thinking model caused by presupposition-driven generation rather than the in-class impromptu generation that rarely happened actually. Based on this, through literature reviews and classroom observation the author compared and contrasted teacher’s teaching syllabus and the actual teaching performance in order to explain, analyze and conclude the feasible ways of presupposed and generative instruction. Besides, the application of classroom observation in this research is also reflected in recording and then concluding strategies that could be used by novice teachers in dealing with in-class impromptu generative resources.The investigation indicates that an appropriate combination of presupposed and generative instruction is absolutely necessary for fostering the students’ ability to use English and think in English. An unexpected finding is that even if students and teachers felt a lot of pressure from exam-oriented teaching style, generative learning mode that fostered in the long-term training of presupposed and generative instruction should still be encouraged for it activates students’ desire to discover, a concept that happens to have the same view of Research-based Teaching.