A Research On Remedial English Teaching For Third-year High School Art Students

Because art students need to study their major besides those common school subjects, their English proficiency is usually lower than ordinary high school students. And their learning motivation is relatively low. Researches about art students'English learning and teaching are easy to find. Many researchers have seen the importance of art students'English learning. However, most of these researches are about college art students. Just a few are concerned about high school art students'English teaching and learning. Besides, at present, English teaching for high school art students is the same with that for ordinary high school students in most schools and training centers. This research aims to study how to make English teaching meet art students'needs and thus enhance their language proficiency and learning motivations. It is based on a teaching experiment, with one class receiving remedial teaching and another class learning Book III just like other third-year high school students. During the remedial teaching, junior middle school text books were chosen as the main teaching materials. Classroom exercise about every unit's vocabulary, expressions and grammar designed by the teacher was used as supporting materials. As for teaching methods, the Translation Method and the Communicative Approach were both used. Both language structures and students' communicative competence were emphasized during classroom teaching. Before the teaching experiment, language proficiency of the two groups was tested. After the remedial teaching, a questionnaire was used to investigate the experimental group's motivational changes, and a comparison between the pretest and posttest results was made to find out changes in students'language proficiency.Findings are as follows. A considerable number of students think junior middle school text books are easy for them and the teaching content is not challenging enough. When it comes to English learning motivations, the research has found that the remedial teaching, especially the Communicative Approach, has some positive effect on students' course-specific motivational conditions, namely, interest in the course, relevance of the course to one's needs, expectancy of success and satisfaction one has in the outcome. However, the effect is not significant. According to the comparison between the pretest and the posttest of the two groups, it has been found that the experimental group has made bigger progress in junior middle school English vocabulary, sentence patterns and grammar, but that is not the case with high school vocabulary and grammar. This is perhaps because the experimental group did not have chances to touch high school English text books. Moreover, the experimental group has made bigger progress in reading and writing.Based on these findings, the following implications for teaching high school art students can be drawn.First, the difficulty level of teaching materials should meet students'needs. The teacher needs to expand and extend the knowledge based on relatively easy materials, so that learning tasks can develop from being easy to being challenging and different students'needs can be met.Second, the teacher needs to develop students'autonomy in English study, to help them learn and master some learning strategies and form good learning habits, such as taking notes in class and reviewing what has been learnt after class.Third, the teacher can use the Communicative Approach sometimes. Organize some communicative classroom activities so as to encourage students to participate more actively in class, increase their experience of success and enhance their English study confidence.