A Survey Of English Classroom Teacher-student Interaction Patterns In Senior High Schools

People communicate with others by means of language which plays an integral role in daily life.In China,English is regarded as a foreign language which people acquire mainly through English class and seldom have opportunities to communicate.China’s English class has long been dominated by traditional teaching method in which the teacher acts as a lecturer and the students as note-takers.However,the aims of the New English Curriculum Standards(2012)for high school are to develop student’s comprehensive abilities,especially the ability of logic thinking in English.Therefore,communicative language teaching and task-based language teaching,which emphasize on the classroom interaction,have attracted people’s attention and support in China.In this thesis,the author investigates the present Teacher-Student interaction situation in Zhenping No.1 senior high school during her four-month teaching practice to answer the following three questions:(1)What are patterns of English classroom T-S interaction in Senior High School?(2)What are features and problems of English classroom T-S interaction in the experimental class,the key class and the ordinary class?(3)What are effective ways to improve classroom T-S to enhance learner’s English proficiency?The author mainly utilized classroom observation,questionnaire and interview to answer the questions above.The findings of the investigation show that in the current senior high school,the T-S interaction patterns mainly include the “teacher with the individual student”,“teacher with the group”,“teacher with the whole class” and “individual student with the teacher”.Generally speaking,the situation of the T-S interaction in the experimental class is the best.In the experimental class,the pattern “the teacher with the group” appears frequently and students take the initiative to ask the teacher questions.However,in the key class and the ordinary class,the pattern “teacher with the group” appears less frequently.But there are problems existing in the “teacher with the group” that some students do not interact with others and some students interact something that has no relation with the class,which is common among all classes.And the author researched from the perspective of interaction contents which include teacher-initiated interaction contents and students-initiated interaction contents.Among contents of the students-initiated interaction,the percentage of “answering the teacher’s question” is the highest.In the ordinary class no students are willing to answer the teacher’s question,which pushes the teacher to call the roll to do it.The study discovered that a large quantity of students is passive in English class,and even worse the students-initiated interaction contents are under the control of the teacher.Besides the teacher often asks “yes” or “no” questions that cannot stimulate students’ thinking.Confronted with the problems above,the teacher should design a class depending on the students’ interests.An interactive class should be full of various patterns and contents under the condition that students actively participate in the class activities.The teacher of the experimental class should design valuable questions and reasonable activities.Yet for the teacher of the key class,it is essential to arouse students’ passion to learn English and apply interesting teaching methods.For the teacher of the ordinary class,the first step is to help students to be conscious of the significance of learning English,and meanwhile apply interesting teaching methods.