A Study On Teachers As Mediators In ELT Of Junior High Schools

Rethinking Education: Towards a global common good? issued by the UNESCO(2015)pointed out that the surge in the amount of information and knowledge poses new challenges for social individuals' ability to acquire and process information,which requires teachers to change their roles and become guides for the learners to achieve development and progress by continuously expanding the knowledge base.China also clearly stated that “we must focus on cultivating key capabilities that support lifelong development and meet the requirements of the times(the State Council,2017).” The growth of students is inseparable from the guidance of teachers.The cultivation of their key abilities needs to be based on the classroom and beyond the classroom.Therefore,the roles of teachers in the classroom should be transmitted from the single disseminators of knowledge to mediators who can empower students the ability of lifelong autonomous development.Feuerstein proposed the Theory of Mediation which advocates teachers as mediators in classroom teaching.By interacting well with students,teachers help them learn how to learn,learn to cope with problems,learn to adapt to different cultural situations,and then to face different challenges from social changes.The Theory of Mediation clearly stated twelve features of teachers as mediators and pointed out the differences and different impacts on students' development between teachers as disseminator of knowledge and teachers as mediators.In order to understand the features of junior high school English teachers as mediators in the classroom teaching,the author selected ten classes from the Tenth National Junior High School English Classroom Teaching Observation Symposium to study:(1)Did the junior high school English teachers play the roles as mediators in class? If yes,what are the features of the distribution?(2)What main factors affect teachers' cognition of mediators in junior high school English classroom teaching?To effectively answer the research questions,the author mainly adopts two methods: video observation and interview.First of all,through observing ten classes repeatedly,the author can know the current situation of key features of English teachers as mediators of junior high school.Then,the author interviewed ten teachers by e-mails,WeChat and other forms to further understand the teachers' cognition of the twelve features of mediation and the main factors affecting teachers as mediators.Some findings are as follow:(1)Junior high school English teachers can play the role of mediators in the classroom.When learning tasks are presented,teachers can obviously make students cotton on the intention of learning.In the process of teaching,students are given more tasks with “challenges”.They create more chances to enable students to fully show their “individuality” as well as fostering awareness of “sharing” and “a sense of belonging”.However,teachers as mediators are not outstanding in the role of helping students to recognize the “significance” of the knowledge they have learned,cultivating their ability of “purpose beyond the here and now” and “goal-setting”,thus forming “awareness of change” and “a belief in positive outcomes”.(2)The twelve features of mediation are not found in every class.The main factors affecting key features of teachers as mediators are the types of class,the English level of students,the design of teaching objectives of class and so on.