An Empirical Study On Boxfish-aided Blended English Learning In Junior High School

In the era of rapid development of internet and networktechnique,more and more modern educational technologies,which provide the necessary equipment support for the development of education,are widely increased in various fields of teaching.Among these technologies,mobile learningtechnologies have been one of the fastest growing domains of technology.Accordingly,there appears a hot topic that academics explore the possibility of mobile technology applied into online learning process and activities.Under this circumstance,blended learning based on mobile learning provides students and teachers with an environment where they can interact in both face-to-face instruction and online learning.Different from the previous studies,most of which focus on blended learning in the higher education,the thesis is to apply Boxfish into the English classroom teaching of Grade eight in Xi'an No.26 Junior High School,to change and assist the traditional teaching mode through the blended learning in the integration of internet resources and textbooks'knowledge and to explore the role and significance of Boxfish-aided blended English learningin improving teaching efficiency and effectiveness.Based on the purpose,the thesis is intended to adopt an empirical study on the Boxfish-aided blended learning for junior high school students and three questions are addressed in the study:First,compared with the control group,what's the correlation between Boxfish-aided blended learning and students' learning achievements?Second,how do students evaluate the Boxfish-aided blended learning?Third,how does Boxfish-aided blended English learninginfluence teaching on the part of teachers?In order to answer these three questions,a semester of teaching experiment was carried out on 106 students of Grade eight in Xi'an No.26 Middle School.One class of 53 students is chosen as the experimental group,and the other 53-student class is considered as the control group,both of which are two parallel classes in the same level of English proficiency.Boxfish-aided blended learning is employed in experimental class,while in control class,the students are taught in the way of the traditional instruction.The thesis employs the tests to investigate the correlation between Boxfish-aided blended English learning and students' learning achievements.An independent&paired sample T-test is conducted to find out the teaching effect between the experimental group and the control group.Meanwhile,descriptive analyses are carried out in the questionnaire and the interview.The questionnaire was delivered in the experimental group at the end of the semester to find how the students evaluate Boxfish-aided blended learning from four dimensions:students'attitudes,evaluation of design and organization,participation as well as its effect,and interviews are conducted for teachers to find out teachers' evaluation on the Boxfish-aided blended learning.These three research instruments are relatively complemented to achieve a more qualified study result.In terms of the results of data analysis,the author concludes that:Firstly,Boxfish-aided blended learning is more effective than the traditional instruction in improving students' learning achievement.And Boxfish-aided blended learning is positively correlated to students' learning achievement.Secondly,through the analysis of the questionnaire,the author finds out that BBL plays a positive role in those four aspects.Thirdly,BBL ishelpful for teachers of middle school in the process of English teaching.There are five chapters in the study.Part one begins with the general introduction of the whole thesis,consisting of its background,significance and purpose.Part two.displays the introduction to the Boxfish and research on Boxfish in the English teaching as well as the blended learning from the perspective of definitions,classifications and the research in this regardat home and abroad.Chapter three is the research methodology.In this part,the author demonstrates the research questions,subjects,instruments,experiment procedures and the process of data collection.Part four involves in the data analysis and discussion which falls into two phases:quantitative and qualitative analysis.The thesis ends with part five:conclusion,which contains the findings and implications of the study as well as the suggestions for further research in this field.Finally,limitations of the research are elaborated.