A Research On Students’ Engagement In English In-Class Games At A Junior High School

It is generally believed that the integration of games in junior high school English in-class teaching can promote students’ engagement in the classroom activities,and help teachers to improve the quality of teaching.However,in actual English in-class game teaching,some problems such as the low degree of students’ engagement and the unsatisfactory learning effect are also noticeable.Against this background,233 Grade-8students and their 2 English teachers at a junior high school in N city of J province are put under investigation on the basis of which suggestions can be made for promoting junior high school students’ engagement in English in-class games,consequently improving the teaching quality.Firstly,a questionnaire survey was undertaken on students’ engagement in English in-class game teaching and factors which hindered their engagement from the four specific dimensions: students’ engagement behavior and effect,students’ emotional attitude and cognition,students’ peer pressure,teachers’ teaching styles and methods.After the survey,close observation of classroom activities and interviews with teachers and students separately were conducted in succession for supplementary analyses of students’ engagement behavior and its effect.The findings of this research can be summarized as the following four major points:First,with regard to the students’ current engagement behavior,although 80% of students can engage in the games,only 60% of them can engage in the whole process at the same time.Second,regarding the effect of English in-class game teaching,82.95% of students have reported to have memorized words effectively and utilized sentence patterns flexibly through engagement,but some of them(20.6%)still failed to internalize these knowledge.Third,in terms of factors which affect students’ engagement,their inner emotional attitude,their cognition,and teachers’ teaching methods and styles,it’s found that all these factors were influential,i.e.,the stronger students’ willingness to engage in English in-class games,the higher their engagement(mean≥4.4);the higher students’ cognition of English in-class game teaching as regard its usefulness,availability and demand),the higher their engagement(mean≥4.5);and the more teachers’ encouragement and guidance for students,or more multimedia for teaching,the higher degree of students’ engagement(mean≥4.5).Last but not least,in accordance with the analyses of classroom observation and respective interviews with teachers and students,it turned that students’ engagement behavior was also affected by the content,level of difficulty and organization of the games.Based on the above findings,pedagogical suggestions for teaching practice are put forward as follows: Firstly,it’s critical to develop a variety of game types to stimulate students’ engagement.In terms of designing,teachers should integrate English games with daily objects so as to encourage with better guidance students to engage in the whole process,subsequently improving students’ comprehensive use of English;as regards game organization,attaching importance to the psychological characteristics of junior high school students,teachers should give priority to cooperative competitive games for the sake of students’ enthusiasm in engagement.Secondly,it’s also significant to adjust finely the difficulty of the games in line with students’ differences involved.In the process of in-class game teaching,teachers should observe the degree of students’ mastery of what they have learned in time,and adjust language points to the difficulty of the games flexibly,keeping balance of these two issues.