A Research On The Status And Suggestions For Development Of Xiamen Senior High School Students In English Literacy

English literacy is a core concept in the new curriculum standard, which is highlighted by both theoretical and practical circles. Chen Lin (2016) noted that the reasons why students should develop their core literacy was the need of putting moral education as the fundamental task, the need of full implementation of quality education and improving the quality of education, and the need of improving the international competitiveness of China's education. Therefore, developing students' core subject literacy is of great importance. English learning, as a kind of language learning, has a strong communicative and applications' function. In the context of quality education, the aim of English learning is not only to master a language, but also to cultivate students' thinking quality, cultural awareness and learning ability, and finally to improve students' English literacy. But most of the high school students' English literacy is poor. Their low English learning interest, weak language using ability, low cultural awareness, fix pattern of thinking make the cultivation of students' English literacy become an urgent task in senior high school.This paper is an empirical study, which is based on the research of previous relevant subject core literacy. It investigates Xiamen senior high school students'English literacy through questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation. The main issues include the status of English literacy and the factors that influence the cultivation of senior high school students' English literacy and the suggestions to improve students'English literary. Through collecting and analyzing the survey data, the results show that the current status of the cultivation of Xiamen high school students' English literacy is not optimistic. According to the survey, the current status of the cultivation of senior high school students' English literacy is connected with teachers' age structure and professional title structure, teaching methods, teaching contents, teaching evaluation and teaching environment. Firstly, the age structure and professional title structure of Xiamen senior high school English teachers are not reasonable. Besides, on-the-job training opportunities are not even and its results are not optimistic. And there is a tendency of job burnout for senior high school teachers. Secondly, classroom teaching is dominated by lecture and questioning. Teacher questionings are unfit to different layers of the students and are lacking of enlightening students' thinking pattern and the quality and quantity of questions are not distributed well in class. Task-based teaching approach is not well applied in actual teaching. Thirdly, in terms of teaching content, teachers are inclined to language teaching while culture teaching is marginalized. In terms of curriculum setting, English course hours reach the standard, but large numbers of students in a class are too many to bear. Fourthly, in the aspect of teaching evaluation, teachers pay more attention to results rather than the process. The daily process of evaluation failed to implement. Opportunities for students' self-assessment and parents' participation in the evaluation are limited. Finally, in the aspect of teaching environment, the campus environment of Xiamen high school tends to create the test- oriented education and utilitarian education behavior. English teachers in senior high school don't pay enough attention to the construction of classroom English atmosphere. In view of this, the author puts forward some relevant teaching suggestions on how to cultivate the English literacy of senior high school students.