A Study On The Effectiveness Of Stratified English Assignments For Rural Junior Middle School Students

Assignments play an important part in junior English teaching.It is also an extension and supplement of classroom teaching.In recent years,there have been more and more discussions about the English assignment design,while the studies on stratified English assignments in rural middle schools have not received sufficient attention.The stratified assignment design is on the basis of the idea that there are individual differences among students in their abilities,so some appropriate measures should be taken accordingly.It aims at improving the effectiveness of assignments for different levels of students;improving their learning efficiency and helping them rebuild confidence.In some rural middle schools,many teachers ignore the individual differences of students in the process of designing assignments.And the assignments are often designed with dull contents and styles,unified requirements and corrections.Too much homework with low quality imposes academic burden on students,which also deviates from the concept advocated by the New English Curriculum Standards.Therefore,in this thesis,the author aims to carry out a research on the status quo of rural junior middle school and explore the effective ways of designing assignments.Firstly,the author summarized the research findings at home and abroad on the assignments for junior middle school students.Then the author explored the new and effective assignments according to the theory of multiple intelligence and zone of proximal development.The study is to investigate the status quo of assignment in rural junior middle schools and to prove the effectiveness of new type of assignments in improving students'English achievements.The author chose students of two classes in Grade Seven in Kongtong Junior School as research subjects,combining with her own teaching practice to carry out the experiment.The author carried out a questionnaire to investigate the current situations of the traditional English assignments.The results showed that there were some problems in the traditional assignments,which couldn't fit for students' individual development.For this,the author tried to design stratified English assignments and put them into teaching practice.The author used the final exam results of the first term in Grade Seven as the pre-test in Experimental Class and the Controlled Class.And the final exam results of the second term were used as the post-test.By comparing the results of the pre-test and post-test in the Experimental Class and the Controlled Class,the author found that before the experiment,students' English levels were almost the same.But after the experiment,students' academic scores of each level have been improved obviously in the Experimental Class,compared with the results in the Controlled Class.In order to prove the effectiveness of stratified assignments,after the experiment,the author delivered the same questionnaire again to investigate students' attitudes toward the stratified assignments.The results showed that students' attitudes and evaluations have changed.After comparing the data of the experiments and questionnaires,the author found that the stratified assignments could improve the effectiveness of learning,consolidate students'prior knowledge,and promote their all-round development.However,there are some limitations in the process of experiment.Further studies of the research are needed in the future.The thesis is mainly made up of six parts.The first chapter mainly presents the background,purpose and significance of the study.The second chapter discusses the relevant studies on assignments both at home and abroad,including the definitions,functions,classifications,principles of assigning homework and the studies on stratified assignments.The third chapter presents the theoretical foundations of the thesis,providing some theoretical support for the study,including Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development.The fourth chapter is about research design,including research questions,research subjects,research procedures and research instruments.Besides,this chapter presents how to stratify assignments based on difficulty,quantity and content.The fifth chapter is about data collections and analysis.In the sixth chapter,the author draws a conclusion,including research results,suggestions and limitations.