Research On Design Of Junior High School English Layered Homework Based On Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy Under The "Double Reduction”

Homework is commonly conceptualized as an inseparable task given to students by school teachers that is meant to be carried out during the non-school time.The common benefits of assigning homework can be formulated as reinforcing the learning materials that have already been presented to students in class,determining whether students have understood the lesson or have mastered the required knowledge and skills,increasing students’ skill proficiency,or even requiring students to apply learned skills to new situations or other areas of interest.Unfortunately,the homework design in practice tends to be more simplistic and mechanical,with little attention paid to students’ higher-order thinking skills,typically in English language teaching.In 2021,with the issue of the “Double Reduction” policy to regulate homework in compulsory education,it quickly becomes a responsibility and necessity for all teachers to focus more on ways of designing effective homework.According to the policy,the new understanding of homework should predominantly highlight its quality instead of quantity,that is,“elevating the quality while reducing the quantity”.However,the research on the ways to achieve this purpose is still in its embryo stage.Against such a backdrop,this study will explore empirically the methods of designing English layered homework with the hope of giving some pedagogical inspiration to English teachers to carry out homework innovation.The study takes two classes and five English teachers as a case study to explore how layered homework can be implemented in practice to achieve the basic requirements of the “Double Reduction”.Both questionnaires and interviews are employed as the key instruments to collect and triangulate research data on both teachers’ and students’ understanding of homework.Furthermore,homework intervention,that is,the layered homework designed by the researcher presented to the students,is also analyzed to document the developmental trajectory of both teachers’ and students’ new conceptualization of homework.With the guidelines of the new curriculum standards(2022)and the theoretical underpinning of Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy,the research questions(RQs)are specifically formulated as 1)What are the general conceptions and status quo of English teachers and students towards English homework? 2)How can the English layered homework be designed under the guidance of the “Double Reduction” policy? and 3)To what extent can the design of English layered homework be effective for students’ learning?In terms of the data analysis,this research concludes that before the promulgation of the “Double Reduction”,the deliberate design of English homework tends to be commonly neglected by English teachers in practice.Simplistic,mechanical,and uniform English homework for all students,such as rote learning exercises,recitation,or extensively completing standardized multiple-choice exercises,etc.,is very prevalent.Open-ended homework requiring students’ higher-order thinking skills is very rare or even naught.Consequently,homework to many students seems to be very boring and even annoying.The quality and effectiveness of homework can’t be guaranteed.Let alone the effective design of homework to meet students’ individual needs.After a period of teaching intervention with the design of layered homework,this study argues that homework design should be diversified cognitively in scale and difficulty to accord with different students’ language competence if the quality and effectiveness of homework expect to be achieved.This study also finds that through the layered homework presented to different language levels of students,their motivation and willingness of doing homework have been greatly improved.More importantly,with the diversified and well-designed layered homework requiring different cognitive orders of thinking,students involved become more engaged and creative in completing their homework tasks.Finally,this study argues that only by considering the layered design of the open-ended and a bit cognitively challenging English homework tasks,the core principle of “elevating the quality while reducing the quantity” advocated by the “Double Reduction” policy can be achieved in practice.