A Research On Student Engagement In English Teaching And Learning In Senior High School

As one of the important manifestations of students' subjectivity,student engagement has become a hot issue in current education and teaching.However,in the real English teaching and learning,teachers have excessive discourse power,leaving few opportunities for the interaction and exploration between students.Students are not very enthusiastic about engaging in teaching activities even there is disengagement existing among some of them.Only when students really engage in teaching activities can students bring the role of main subject into full play with improving learning efficiency and teaching efficiency.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to carry out the research of student engagement in English teaching and learning in senior high school.The meanings of student engagement in English teaching and learning in senior high school in the paper are as follows.As for teachers,it implies senior high school students engage in teaching activities.As to senior high school students,it means they involve in learning activities.The study chooses 218 students and six English teachers from a key senior high school in Gui Lin as research subjects.Through questionnaire,classroom observation and interview,the study mainly focuses on the following questions:(1)What's current situation of student engagement in English teaching and learning like?(2)Which factors promote student engagement in English teaching and learning?(3)What problems exists in student engagement?The research has the following findings:(1)Students have a positive attitude towards engaging in English teaching and learning,which mainly shows as follows: the high recognition of engagement in the learning activities from before class to after class.And their ways of engagement,in generally,fulfill the requirements of learning ways and classroom behaviors.They have rather high degree of engagement.And there aresignificant differences between students in different personalities and classes in terms of the recognition of engagement.In view of the ways of engagement and the degree of engagement,there are significant differences among students in different personalities,classes and English levels.(2)The factors promoting student engagement in English teaching and learning contain personal factors(interest,parents' expectation,ability,a sense of achievement,academic expectation,confidence),teacher's factors(teaching,the distribution of opportunity in student engagement,charming personality,teacher's expectation,teacher's encouragement),environmental factors(classroom learning atmosphere,classroom discipline and the peer relationship).(3)Some problems need to be urgently solved in student engagement.In the ways of engagement,students are lack of engagement in browsing the text before class,questioning or enquiring,keeping a diary or weekly note in English and doing self-reflection after class.In light of the degree of engagement,students' active engagement is not so high.And the chances for the interaction between students that teachers provide are rather less.Basing on the research findings,the author puts forward some suggestions for the status of student engagement.For teachers,they should teach students how to learn and lead them to engage in learning activities.They also need to strengthen students' consciousness of active participation and arouse their enthusiasm to engage in English teaching and learning as well as guarantee the opportunities for the interaction between students.And for students,for one thing,they need to pay attention to preparation and accumulation at ordinary times and make full use of the time to improve their learning efficiency.For another thing,they also need to establish the awareness and the concept of active participation and give play to the role of main subject.Owing to the limitation of condition and personal ability,there are still some deficiencies in the research.The subjects selected are just chosen from one senior high school in the research and the results of the study may not just represent the situation of all the senior high schools in China.The research focuses on student engagement by investigating into some specific behaviors based on previous researches,which may result in insufficiency in the depth of the content and may be lacking in the depth of research.The time of the research was rather short,which may be not so comprehensive to graspthe situation of student engagement.According to the above-mentioned limitations of the research,the following suggestions are proposed for further researches in the future.The sample and scope of the research should be extended to more schools and more areas to make research results more representative and persuasive.The content of the research could be further extended in behavior of silence thinking,questioning and enquiring to make research more deeper.The time of the research could be increased to gain more specific situation about student engagement.