An Empirical Study On Graded English Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

Classroom teaching is one kind of the current teaching ways. But the individual difference of students is always a big problem, which is difficult to solve. This has become a central issue of teaching research. As we all know, the individual differences between students exist in each class, especially in private schools. How to carry out English teaching with students'individual differences has been a tough problem in private school.Considering the current situation and problems of English teaching, the graded teaching experiment was carried out at Jiangmen China-Hongkong English School. The main purpose of the experiment is to improve English teaching. The experiment was carried out in Class One, Grade Seven, from September,2009 to June,2010. In order to find out the teaching effect, Class 2 in the same grade was chosen as the controlled class. This research was based on the following theoretical frameworks: Vygolsky's Zone of Proximal Development theory, Bloom's Mastery Learning theory and Taxonomy of educational objectives theory, Babansky's Optimization of Educational Process theory. Varieties of research methods such as literature analysis, questionnaires, face-to-face talks, etc, were used in this experiment. This thesis mainly discussed how the graded teaching pattern can solve the problems encountered as a result of the students'individual differences; and how to improve students' learning interest and performance in the examinations.Before and after the experiment, two pieces of questionnaires were used to investigate students'English learning situations and opinions of the graded teaching pattern. At the same time, pre-test and post-test were also used to investigate students' performances in English examinations. From the analysis, we can see that, different from the traditional ungraded teaching pattern, the graded teaching pattern is a good way to solve the problems brought about by the contradiction between whole-group teaching and individual differences. What's more, it can improve students'interest in English learning and their pcrformances in the examinations.