A Research Into The Design Of Effective Junior High School Homework

The New Curriculum Standard for Junior High School(2003)requires that students should be the center of teaching,and moreover,great attention should be paid not only to academic scores of the learners,but also to their emotions and attitudes towards learning,the cultivation of their independent learning ability,and ultimately their overall development.Homework plays an important role in achieving these goals,and the effective design is an indispensable benchmark to know and to evaluate teachers’ teaching and students’ learning.But there are many problems with the current junior high school English homework.The effective design to reach these goals is far from being achieved.This thesis,based on the relevant research findings both at home and abroad of elementary and junior high school homework,is going to explore how to design effective junior high school English homework.It will be conducted first by designing a questionnaire and interview questions.The questionnaire mainly adopts the one designed by Sarah North and Hannah Philly in 2002 with a little adjustment.Both the questionnaire and the interview questions contain five aspects: the function,the content,the form,the complexity,and the quantity of English homework.Secondly,the questionnaire will be sent to 240 students in the seventh grade of two junior high schools in Xi’an,and 5 English teachers in the same grade of the same school will be selected and interviewed.Thirdly,after the questionnaires have been collected,the data and the interview results will be analyzed.Fourthly,six guiding principles will be put forward based on Constructivism Learning Theory and Multiple Intelligences Theory,and the essential factors which make up an effective design of junior high school English homework are analyzed with the guidance of the principles.Finally,the thesis will draw a conclusion and make some suggestions on further research in it in the future.