Study On Application Of Inquiry-based Teaching Of English In Senior Middle School Under Curriculum Reform

Education is an important way of cultivating people. With the development of technology, the need of talents by society is becoming diverse, which puts forward higher requirement to the educational sector. Many countries in the world have carried out educational reform to accommodate the development. The main purpose of the educational reform is to train students to break the constraints of the traditional teaching, insisting the teaching principal of"people first", based on teaching materials, to cultivate the students to be person with innovative and practical ability. Inquiry-based teaching is developed on the basis of scientific research, and mostly used in research study, less in the teaching of art.Many schools have advocated inquiry-based teaching since 1990s when China carried out education reform. Infected by traditional teaching, the implementation of inquiry-based teaching is not satisfied. The study tries to implement inquiry-based teaching in senior middle school in the context of education reform, analyze the problems which made the inquiry-based English teaching hard to implement, check the effectiveness of implementing the inquiry-based teaching in senior middle school, draw enlightenment from it in order to improve the ability of students and develop the education reform.The study is divided into five parts. The first chapter states the background of the study, proposes the research questions, and lists the significances of implementing inquiry-based teaching in senior middle school. In Chapter Two, inquiry and inquiry-based teaching has been firstly introduced, it discusses the theoretical basis of inquiry-based teaching, concludes the others research on problems existed in English teaching in senior middle schools, and combines the studies of it in China and abroad to establish foundation of this study. Chapter Three describes the research design and methodology in this thesis. Firstly, the investigation has been carried out in Grade Two in Lingyuan No.2 Senior Middle School by questionnaires to find out the problems in English teaching. Two classes have been chosen to be control class and experimental class, inquiry-based teaching has been implemented in experimental class, the responses of teachers and students before and after the implementation of inquiry-based teaching through questionnaires among students have been investigated, in order to find out the reasons which made inquiry-based teaching hard to be carried out, in addition, it proposes teaching strategies of implementing inquiry-based teaching and investigates the effectiveness of inquiry-based teaching. Chapter Four analyzes the questionnaires collected at first, and makes finding and analysis of the scores before and after the implementing of inquiry-based teaching, finally, it is found that the implementation of inquiry-based teaching can increase the score of the students. Chapter Five concludes the inspirations to the teachers from the implementation of inquiry-based teaching, which means paying attention to the content of inquiry-based teaching, the positive position of the students, the organization and conduct effect of the teachers and the relationship between inquiry-based teaching and traditional teaching when implementing inquiry-based teaching in senior middle schools. And finally it makes a summary, and lists the limitations of this study.