A Humanistic Study Of The Assumptive Teacher-immersed Model In Group Discussion

Humanistic psychology or humanism which began in the 1950s in America was the third force of psychology after behavioral and cognitive psychology. Humanism highlights personal value and dignity, and it asserts that the ideal education should be student-centered and the goal of education lies in developing the whole person of intelligence and emotion. The application of humanistic approach in language instruction contributes to the formation of student-centered language instruction, in which language learners'initiative and motivation are highly emphasized and a language teacher plays a role of facilitator to create a relaxed learning environment. This theory has already been widely applied and greatly influenced foreign language teaching and learning.With the teaching mode shifting from teacher-centered to learner-centered in recent years, organizing group discussion has become more and more popular in EFL (English as Foreign Language) teaching. Group discussion, one type of group work, is defined as a number of people who interact with one another aiming at improving their communicative competence. But in the actual implementation of group discussion in class, the teacher is still detached from the group since they do not want to disrupt the discussion, however, this is contradictory to what humanism supports --- the teacher should become an active group participant, so the current group teaching is still far from satisfactory and many problems occur. The problems are teachers'lack of control of their class, student's lack of teacher's help, little enthusiasm, slack participants, too much Chinese, the digression of the topic and the like. It is evident that they are related to teachers'participation in group discussion. In view of this, from a humanistic view, the author attempts to propose a model assumption, i.e. Assumptive Teacher-immersed Model (ATIM) featuring the teacher as an active participant in the group, who aims at guiding, encouraging, helping, and facilitating students'studying, against the Present Teacher-instructing Model (PTIM) featuring the teacher as an instructor outside the group. The purposes of this thesis tend to: (1) examine the possible impacts of ATIM on the students'English learning regarding their participation, communicative competence, interest and self-confidence; (2) figure out the degree to which the teacher immerses in group discussion.The study was conducted in the autumn semester in 2007 in Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. A class of 50 students mainly majoring in finance participated in the research. Data collection methods include live recording, questionnaire and interview. Based on the data collection and analysis of the results, the author finds that: 1) ATIM makes students, especially the shy and unconfident ones, more active in the group discussion; 2) ATIM is more conductive to the promotion of students'communicative competence; 3) ATIM contributes more to the increase of students'learning interest; 4) ATIM makes students more self-confident in speaking English; 5) it is advisable for the teacher to, partially rather than fully, immerse in the group discussion, in order to create more chances and free spaces for the students to perform by themselves.