A Study On Differentiating Instruction In Large-sized English Classes Of Senior High Schools

English teaching in senior high schools is usually carried out in large-sized classes in many regions of China. For China is now a country with a large number of school-age population. Besides, education resource allocation is not balanced, and high quality education resources are in short supply. All this hinders the quality of high school English teaching from getting improved, and educational equality from being implemented, which is unfavorable for the cultivation of students’ personality and all-round development.The purpose of Education is to cultivate people, and any individual person is different from another. It is just the differences between individual students that make teaching a complex and challenging job. So it is important to take students’ differences into consideration and to make them become fully developed. Educational reform in China focuses more on offering equal opportunities for students in both receiving education and personality development. Differentiating Instruction is a recommended way to help achieve this educational purpose.This study takes two senior middle schools in Xi’an as the experimental schools. Through a questionnaire survey, classroom observations and interviews, the researcher gets the first-hand materials about high school English teachers’ attitude toward Differentiating Instruction, problems in carrying out Differentiating Instruction, hence coming up with the relevant strategies for solving these problems.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part is the introduction, which includes research background, research purposes and significance of the research.The second part covers the literature from domestic viewpoints as well as overseas viewpoints, including the disadvantages of large-sized class teaching, definition and characteristics of Differentiating Instruction, the theoretical bases of Differentiating Instruction, and related researches home and abroad.The third part elaborates on the research questions, subjects, research methodology, research instruments, detailed procedures of the study, and so on.The fourth part is the discussion and analysis of the research results on the base of data collection, including questionnaire survey, classroom observations and interviews.The last part makes a conclusion of the investigation results and puts forward some proposals for differentiating English teaching.on the basis of investigation findings. Meanwhile it makes a brief conclusion of the paper, and points out deficiencies and defects of the present study.