Effects Of Classroom Teaching On Students’ Disciplinary Literacy Under The Guidance Of PBL Theory

This thesis is an empirical study about whether teaching Project Sections in Advance with English under the guidance of project-based learning theory can cultivate students’ disciplinary literacy of English subject.In recent years,the issue on core literacy has attracted so much attention around the world that many international organizations and countries have been carrying out relevant researches,which leads to the concept of disciplinary literacy.There are more and more researches on the disciplinary literacy in China,especially the combination of it and foreign language learning,which constructs the framework of disciplinary literacy of English subject that includes language competency,quality of thinking,cultural awareness and learning ability.However,few empirical experiments are conducted among those relevant studies at home and abroad and most of them simply offer teaching suggestions from the theoretical level.This study combines the cultivation of the disciplinary literacy with the teaching of the Project Sections in Advance with English,and explores how to promote the development of students’ disciplinary literacy in the real teaching environment.Based on the PBL theory,this study conducted a two-month teaching experiment in the High School attached to Hunan Normal University.Eighty-five students From Class1601 and 1603 in Grade One were selected as research subjects.Class 1603,named Class One,was regarded as experimental class receiving the teaching based on PBL theory and Class 1601,named Class Two as the comparison class receiving the traditional way of teaching.The research questions are as follows:1.Which aspect of students’ disciplinary literacy gets improved most after teaching of the Project section in Advance with English with the guidance of PBL theory?2.What effective and feasible suggestions does the PBL theory offer to cultivate students’ disciplinary literacy during the classroom teaching of the Project section in Advance with English?In order to answer the questions above,this study used quantitative analysis.The two classes had the tests at the same time,using the same test content,and the interval of two tests,pre-test and post-test,is two months.The data was analyzed through SPSS 21.0 after the collection.Due to the small number of samples and uncertainty about the data distribution,the two independent samples non-parametric test and the paired-samples non-parametric test were adopted.The major findings are listed as follows:1.Teaching the Project Sections under the guidance of the PBL theory is good for cultivating students’ disciplinary literacy of English subject.2.Under the guidance of the PBL theory,the teaching has greater effects on students’ quality of thinking and cultural awareness than their language competency.Those findings also offer us many teaching implications from three aspects.Firstly,from the perspective of language competency,teachers should change ways of teaching language points to arouse students’ interests and train students’ listening and speaking competence to promote their writing ability.Secondly,from the perspective of quality of thinking,teachers are supposed to dig the teaching material to stimulate and deepen students’ thinking,and then conduct the group project to “live” their thinking.Thirdly,from the perspective of cultural awareness,teachers are expected to add cultural background information to enrich students’ cultural knowledge and compare the cultural differences to strengthen their cultural understanding.Therefore,this study is intended to offer practical suggestions for the classroom teaching of Project Sections in Advance with English.However,due to the limited time as well as the author’s academic ability,the present study is not flawless.Firstly,the research subjects are only a small part of English learners in senior high school.More students should be involved with this study to test the effects of teaching.Secondly,this study only focuses on some certain aspects of disciplinary literacy of English subject,not mentioning all the aspects,such as learning ability and so on.Therefore,further study should be more substantial.Thirdly,teaching the Project sections should not always be based on one single theory.In future studies,it can be combined with other theories to give guidance to cultivate students’ disciplinary literacy.