A Case Analysis Of Heterogeneous Classes Of The Band That Wasn't

This case analysis is concerned with heterogeneous classes of senior high school English reading where three teachers from Yangchun,Guangdong,made different instructional designs based on the Reading Section The band that wasn't in Unit 5,Book Two of PEP Senior English Compulsory Course and implemented the same class.The theoretical bases of this study are Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Swain's Output Hypothesis and Humanistic theory.The significance of this study lies in three aspects:helping improve teachers' classroom teaching skills like lead-in skill and organization skill;helping improve teachers' ability to realize the three dimensional teaching objectives;and helping teachers to learn from each others for their professional development.The procedures of this study include choosing the class,watching the teaching videos repeatedly,transcribing the three classes,comparing the three cases and analyzing each class's strengths and weaknesses.The three teachers were labeled as ML,MY and MZ respectively for the convenience of analysis.In the first case,ML mainly employed the task-based approach.She asked the students to complete the tasks of finding information about the Monkees,summarizing the development history of the band,retelling the band's success road and writing about their favorite bands during the reading process.In the second case,MY adopted the PWP reading teaching model.In the pre-reading part,she let the students appreciate a music video and asked them to guess the names of bands according to their music;in the while-reading part,she taught students reading skills like scanning and skimming and asked them to talk about the success of the Monkees;in the post-reading part,she let the students share their favourite bands and do a self-check.In the third case,MZ employed the heuristic teaching approach,where she stimulated students' thinking about the role of music in our life and the success of the Monkees by asking questions about the music and development of the Monkees.The case analysis reveals that each of the teachers' classroom teaching has its own strengths and weaknesses.Specifically,in terms of the strengths in the first case:firstly,all of her teaching links from learning the development of the band to retelling the reasons for their success are logically related;secondly,in terms of organization skill,ML used many gestures to better organize the whole class;thirdly,in order to achieve the goal of knowledge and skills,ML introduced much background information about the Monkees before learning the Reading Section,which is in agreement with Krashen's theory that ideal language input should be comprehensible.The weaknesses of the class are shown below.Firstly,to lead in the class,ML played a song named Music is the Key.The students were neither familiar with the song nor interested in it,thus reducing their attention to it.Secondly,the objective of emotional attitude and values is not well realized.The second case's strengths are shown below.Firstly,in order to teach students reading skills like skimming or scanning,MY asked the students to find out the general ideas and details of each paragraph on their own,acting as a facilitator,which is more effective according to Humanistic Learning Theory.Secondly,to realize the objective of emotional attitude and values,MY paid more attention to cultivating students' love for music and inspiring their thinking about the band's success,which is more in line with the propositions of Humanistic Theory that emotional education is more important.Thirdly,in terms of closure skill,MY arranged a self-evaluation at the end of the class,which was a very effective measure to stimulate students' intrinsic motivation to learn.This class's main weakness is that the tasks designed after the pre-reading part like teaching reading skills and talking about the success of the band is not logically related.As for the third case,its main strength is that during the process of realizing the objective of method and process,MZ kept asking students illuminating questions like "What do you think of the band's music?" "Why did the band become successful?" to guide the students to comprehend the passage step by step.Its weaknesses are shown below.Firstly,the exercises MZ designed did not need the students'own output,which cannot help students realize the problems of their own language expressions.Secondly,like MY,MZ did not pay much attention to realizing the goal of emotional attitude and values either.There are two limitations of this study:The first one is that it is somewhat one-sided to analyze the three classes mainly from these three dimensions.The second one is that the analysis of the three classes is based on non-participant observations,where the author did not have the experience of attending the three classes personally,thus lacking intuitive experience.