A Case Study Of Integrative Unit Teaching From Activity-based View Of English Learning In Junior High School

Activity-based View of English Learning and theme-based integrative unit teaching was advocated in English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017),which also offers some implications for English teaching in junior high school.This case study aims to find out how well it is conducted by a teacher in junior high school so as to offer some suggestions for future English teaching in junior high school.The participants in the study was one teacher in a medium-level junior high school in Tianjin and 54 students in her class.12 lessons of different modules were recorded for observation and analysis.Classroom observation and interviews were mainly employed in the study.There are mainly three research questions:(1)What kinds of activities are used in these 12 lessons respectively? Are these activities in each unit focusing on the theme of the unit?(2)What is the students' attitude towards the integrative unit teaching from Activity-based View of English Learning?(3)What is the teacher's attitude towards the integrative unit teaching from Activity-based View of English Learning? By analyzing these lessons and the interview results,major findings are as follows.(1)Three levels of activities(learning and understanding activities;application and practice activities;transformation and innovation activities)were used and most of them were theme-based in the 12 classes observed,but there was imbalance among these activities,showing that application and practice activities took up much time andappeared more times than learning and understanding activities,transformation and innovation activities.(2)The students showed their great interest and could output proper results.But they stated that this teaching model appeared less because of the final exam.(3)The teacher found it easier to prepare and have classes,but sometimes she cannot achieve the objectives of some activities.These results have some implications:(1)When designing activities in class,teachers should focus on the theme of the unit based on the types of teaching materials and try to allocate the time properly for three types of activities.(2)Teachers may stick to this new approach to motivate those students who lack interest and try to apply the integrated unit teaching in revision period for final examination.(3)Teachers should have a systematic study of activity-based view of learning and gradually form their list of different activities.Lastly,there exists some limitations due to the author's insufficient experience.Firstly,the samples of the thesis are limited,only focusing on just one teacher and one school.Secondly,the feedback from the students was not done immediately after the conducting of the lessons because of the time restraint.Thirdly,due to the time limit and practical conditions,the concluded results were not used into practice to check its reliability.