| With more children learning English in China, children’s English education is becoming more and more popular and important. Parents have changed their view from “if a kid just studies English from an early age, it will influence their learning Pinyin” to “if a kid does not learn English in kindergarten, he or she will fall behind compared with other kids.” One psychologist in Yale University holds the view that kids who can speak two languages have more advantages in solving problems than those who can only speak one language, and the same goes with their brain’s flexibility.As more and more parents begin to pay attention to kids’ English education, various kinds of English training institutions have appeared. Each of them adopts different kinds of teaching methods. According to a survey about teaching methods on the internet, nowadays, the mainly teaching methods used by English training institutions are Situational Language Teaching Method, Communicative Language Teaching and Immersion Teaching Method. At present, the slogan of English teaching is English Immersion Education, which main purpose is to cultivate the English thinking and language sense. Therefore, most English training institutions would like to choose Immersion Teaching Method as their main teaching method. Although Immersion Teaching Method can create better language environment and English learning atmosphere, it seldom takes children’s psychological needs, psychological characteristics and time requirements into consideration. As a result, many children lose their interest in English.Interest is the best teacher, and playing is the nature of every kid. This sentence indicates that if we want to make the kids learn English well, we must get them interested in English first, and then let them learn English in the relaxing atmosphere. From the view of psychology, the attention that children paid is called “involuntary attention”, and the involuntary attention is not controlled by the ideology. That is to say, children only pay attention to things, which they are interested in. So it becomes very important for us to treat interest as the top priority. Total Physical Response(TPR) was put forward by an American psychology professor named James Asher in the 1960 s. It is based on children’s psychological needs and psychological characteristics. It can capture children’s attention and enhance their learning experience. In order to improve children’s interest in English learning, this thesis will explore the connection between Total Physical Response and children’s interest in English study through the practical application in children’s English teaching. This thesis consists of six parts and the details of each part are shown as follows:The first part is Introduction. It mainly introduces the current situation and the study significance of children’s English education. In modern China, more and more children study English at an early age, and the children’s English education gets more attention than before. As a special group of education receiver, the main problems of children’s learning process are their age and attention. The key to children’s education is to find a way that can arouse their interest to learning English. In this chapter, it also presents the research questions and layout of the thesis.The second part is the literature review. In this chapter, the author shows four kinds of teaching methods, which are widely used in children’s English teaching. And these four teaching methods are analyzed in both foreign countries and China. These four teaching methods are the Situational Language Teaching Method, Communicative Language Teaching, Immersion Teaching Method and Total Physical Response. This thesis lists the origins, characteristics and practical application of these four teaching methods.The third part includes the theoretical framework of TPR, the definition of interest and the relationship between interest and TPR. There are four basic principles in TPR. Firstly, to let the second language enter children’s right hemisphere. Secondly, the main pattern for teaching and learning is “listening—do actions”. Thirdly, teachers should use imperative sentences as the main teaching language. The last one is that teachers should tolerate children’s mistakes as much as possible. Under the guidance of such principles, the advantage of TPR is that it can draw kids’ attention in class to a higher level. This is a crucial point in children’s English Teaching. Many scholars both at home and abroad have done some researches about the usage of TPR in kids’ or adults’ learning. But most of the researches just talk about the application in the class teaching. However, there are few researches on the influence of the TPR on children’s learning interest. Therefore, the author will mainly focus on the relationship between the TPR teaching method and kids’ interest in learning English. As we all know, “interest” is an abstract noun. This thesis is divided interest into three aspects: the first one is classroom discipline, the second one is learning initiative, and the third one is learning efficiency. The connections between interest and TPR are reflected in these three aspects.The fourth part lists the experiment method and procedures. At the same time, the author makes four assumptions in this chapter: the first one is that classroom discipline, children’s learning initiative and study efficiency are the three elements, which can reflect children’s interest in learning English. The second one is that TPR can make a better classroom discipline than Immersion Teaching Method. The third one is that TPR is more helpful to motivate children’s learning initiative in English than Immersion Teaching Method. The last one is that TPR is a more effective way to increase children’s study efficiency in English. The research approaches include classroom assessment, test and questionnaires that are based on these questions. In the end of this chapter, the author gives a teaching sample of TPR to show the details of teaching steps.The fifth part is the statistical analysis. The author makes an experiment in Hongen Children’s English School for three months to find out whether TPR can help increasing the interest of learning English. The experimental subjects are 69 students that are selected in Grade One and Grade Two. One experimental class is taught by TPR. The other class is controlled class, which is taught by Immersion Teaching Method. Each parent is asked to do a questionnaires survey both before and after the experiment. And teachers kept recording the situations in each class during the three months. At last, the author makes a contrast and statistical analysis. From the data, the author finds that the experimental classes and the controlled classes are in the same level before the experiment. But after the experiment, the former is better than the latter. This proves that TPR teaching method has got remarkable achievements on increasing the interest of learning English.The sixth part is Conclusion. It concludes the major findings that generate from the contrastive analysis of these experimental data. The major findings show that TPR can really increase children’s interest in learning English. At the same time, the conclusion also analyzes limitations of this study. The limitations include the number of subjects, time constraint and influence factors in class. In the end, the author suggests that further studies should be based on plenty of time and larger population. In addition, TPR as an effective methodology should not only be used in children’s English teaching, but also in broader teaching area. |
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