Applying The Cognitive Approach To English Teaching In The Senior Middle School

Cognitive Approach is also called cognitive-code approach. It is a foreign language teaching system or learning theory about how to bring the students' intellectual roles into full play in the foreign language teaching and how to understand the rules of language. It focuses on the practical and comprehensive training in the use of language skills, therefore also known as cognitive-code learning theory. The approach is based on cognitive psychology theory—recognition happening theory suggested by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and the basic structure and the theory found by the United States psychologist Brunner (J.S.Bruner, 1962).Its linguistics theoretical basis is Chomsky's transformational—generative grammar. American psychologist Carroll first raised Cognitive Approach which regards learning as intelligent activities. It believes that language learning is a process which involves active mental processes, not simply the forming of habits. Without comprehension, there will be no language and language learning. Language is unique to the human communication tool. Cognitive Approach does not exclude training, which emphasizes the role of intelligence. In the process of teaching, first, we must make the students understand the materials;Second, we must acknowledge the law in using language so that we can draw inferences about learning language, thereby improving teaching effectiveness.Cognitive learning method gives important to learners' active and automatic part in the process of using and learning language, particularly in the learning of grammatical rules. It believes that if we want to achieve the purpose of really mastering foreign languages, we should be guided by the following basic principles in the teaching: 1.Learner being taken as the center;2. Emphasizing meaningful learning and meaningful practice at the basis of comprehending the linguistic knowledge and rules;3. Attaching equal importance to the four skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing;4. Appropriate use of the mother tongue, for mother tongue is the language experience that the students have got, and also the basis for learning foreign languages;5. Tolerating the student's language mistakes. Not all mistakes but the major deficiencies should be analyzed and corrected;6. Making wide use of audio-visual aids and modernized teaching techniques so as to make English learning meaningful. Its teaching process canbe summarized into three phases—"understanding (sentence structure and the content of learning)-*form(language competence)-'■use (language, also called the language action)", namely "understanding language, language development and application of language."Cognitive theory believes that English learning is the process of integrating new and old language knowledge, as language ability is transformed from the theoretical knowledge into automated application process. This integration and transformation must be achieved through students' own activities. Without students' active participation, it is impossible to mobilize students' learning motivation, exploit their learning potential and effectively develop and enhance students' integrative language competence- listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. By deriving the inspiration from Cognitive Approach, we recognize the need to cultivate students language knowledge, interpersonal skills and overall quality. In classroom teaching process we must guide and inspire them while learning language;They should link their own thoughts, think and discuss real life problems, and use language from the theoretical knowledge into automated application process. So in a year of teaching practice, I have been guided by these principles, focusing on training students' abilities to use knowledge to solve problems. Through the teaching for one year, the result proved it was feasible using Cognitive Approach in high school English teaching. I started to use Cognitive Approach to teach English when I was an English teacher in Grade Two in Tong Shan Number One Middle School in 2003. This class is led by a large class of 60 or more. In each examination, the passing rate, the average rate and superior mark rate of the two classes I taught were the best among the parallel classes. After the final examination , comparing the results of the final examination and the exam at the beginning of the term, passing rates had increased by 24.8 percentage and the rate beyond 120 mark by 5.2 percentage and the average mark has increased considerably. The approach is applied in a large class of high school. Cognitive Approach stresses that understanding play the important role in foreign language teaching. It advocates to do creative communication exercises in understanding on the basis of the newly learning language materials. It focuses on training students to develop their language skills and communicative skills.