An Investigation On English Homework In Junior High Under The Background Of Burden Reduction

One of the critical challenges with compulsory education is the overwhelming amount of homework students receive in primary and secondary schools.The New English Curriculum Standards aims at cultivating students’ core competence of English and proposes to achieve the requirements of the double reduction policy.In addition to the time allotted for completion,teachers must pay attention to students’ attitudes and feelings towards their English homework.In order to investigate the current situation of English homework under double reduction,this study attempts to answer the following three questions:(1)What’s the overall situation of the purposes,resources,types and feedback of English homework assigned by teachers?(2)What’s the overall situation of the ways,time and feelings of students to complete their English homework?(3)What are the correlations among the time spent on English homework,students’ English achievement and their feelings?The research subjects are junior two students and English teachers at a middle school in Guanghan.A total of 250 student questionnaires and 15 teacher questionnaires were distributed,and 237 valid student questionnaires(the ratio of boys to girls is close to 1:1)and 15 teacher questionnaires(including senior,intermediate,and junior teachers)were recovered,and then four English teachers and six students were interviewed.Excel and SPSS 22.0 were used to analyze the collected data.The answers are as follows:(1)The overall situation of English homework assigned by teachers is as follows: its purpose is primarily exam-oriented,with the goal of consolidating knowledge and improving scores.The resource is too limited and overly reliant on prescribed textbook exercises;the types are relatively monotonous,mostly exercises similar to questions on the senior high school entrance examination and not very cognitively demanding,and the manmachine dialogue examination has resulted in an increase in oral homework.The feedback is mainly from teachers.Students rarely participate in feedback and are mostly passive.Teachers began to experiment with new ideas for organizing and designing English homework,but the application of methods is still in an early stage.(2)The overall situation of students’ completion of English homework is as follows: there is no significant gender difference in how students complete English homework,and most students complete it independently,with less assistance from classmates and parents.However,there is a significant gender difference in time.Boys spend more time than girls,and the overall time is shorter than that before the double reduction policy was introduced,but it is still excessive.There is no significant gender difference in students’ feelings towards English homework.The feeling indexes of importance and autonomy are higher,but mobility and pleasure are lower.(3)There is a significant negative correlation between the time spent on English homework and students’ English achievement;There is also a significant negative correlation between the time spent on English homework and the two dimensions of students’ feelings: importance and mobility,but there is no significant correlation with autonomy and pleasure.Besides,there is a significant positive correlation between students’ English achievement and the four dimensions of feelings.Based on the findings,teachers are supposed to focus on developing students’ comprehensive ability,enriching the resources and types of homework,giving full play to students’ initiative in homework feedback,enhancing their ability to manage their own time when completing homework,arranging homework time reasonably and paying attention to students’ emotions.