Layered Teaching In High School English Teaching:Design And Practice

Education in China today requires that teaching should be focused on all students,and teaching should also be centered on students.Meanwhile,the educators are supposed to care about the development of each student.Therefore,this puts high demands on teachers in China.In reality,due to the enrollment policy in high school,students in high schools of China are of great diversity,but they are usually assigned to the same class.Besides,some of the students come from the countryside,while others come from the city,and their English levels are uneven and the difference is huge.Such a complicated situation greatly increases the difficulty of English teaching in high schools.Traditional English teaching methods often adopt the mode of "marching together",ignoring individual differences.Teachers use the same teaching materials,standards and modes to train students of different levels.This kind of teaching is time-consuming and has low efficiency,which affects the overall development of students.Eventually,the top students in the class cannot be significantly improved.The medium-level students are exhausted and fail to get the gist.The underachievers cannot understand the teaching materials,which will affect their self-confidence and motivation to learn,and thus eventually losing their interest and self-motivation in learning English and giving up learning English.This not only seriously deviates from the requirements of the new curriculum reform,but also restricts the improvement of students' English language ability.The high school where the present author is teaching is faced with this problem.In his teaching,he noticed the seriousness of this problem and therefore he proposes that layered teaching be applied to solve the problem.In order to verify the practicability and effectiveness of layered teaching,the present author carried out a contrastive study in two classes of Senior Two in Yunyang Middle School of Shiyan,Hubei.He randomly appointed one of the two classes as experimental class and the other as control class.Then he divided the students of experimental class into three groups,respectively labeled as Level A(High Level),Level B(Medium Level)and Level C(Low level),according to their academic achievement in English.Layered teaching was applied in the English class of experimental class whereas in control class students were taught without differentiation.The experiment involved tests,class observation,questionnaires and interviews.After the experiment which lasted one academic year,the scores of the two classes' English tests were compared,and combining the test scores with the data collected with the other experimental tools,the present author analyzed and evaluated the results of the experiment.The results indicate that applying layered teaching in high school English teaching can:firstly,enhance the class participation of students of all levels;secondly,increase students' interest in English study,their motivation and their confidence;thirdly,helps students of all levels to improve their academic performance in English;fourthly,strengthen the emotional communication between teachers and students.The results also show that students hold different attitudes towards layered teaching in different teaching procedures,which requires teachers to make adjustments accordingly in the application of this teaching method.