A Study On The English Classroom’s Ecology Of Colleges In Zhengzhou City

Over the20th century, as the fact that the concepts such as "ecology","harmony" and "health" have deeply rooted among the people, ecology has already exceeded the biology category and permeated many fields considered as a strong theoretical analysis tool. Ecology ideas, viewpoints and methods are increasingly being borrowed and transplanted. Ecology has been more and more widely applied as a new type of common methodology and ethics. Educational ecology, born in the1960s and1970s, is just a subject which uses ecological principles and methods to study education phenomenon. The birth of education ecology is not only the outcome of ecology development and differentiation, but also the start that education researchers consciously use the principles and methods of ecology to study education problems. In such combination of ecology and education, the researchers are always keeping exploring and adding the educational ecologic theories. However, it still needs the further study, especially on the comprehensive and meticulous observations and solutions about the practical and concrete educational problems basing on the abundant ecologic theories. This thesis applied the ecologic theories to do an empirical study about the English classroom teaching and learning. The main purpose of this study is to make a comparison between the collected data and the ecologic standards. And then explore the non-ecologic educational problems in the English classroom and analyze the reasons for these non-ecologic factors. At the end of the study, the author also tried her best to detect the corresponding suggestions to improve the ecologic classroom basing on the related ecologic theories, the author’s experience and the other area’s theories.To achieve the study purpose, this study is developed by the following three research questions:1. What’s the present situation of each ecologic factor in Zhengzhou colleges’ English classrooms?2. Which are the non-ecologic factors that break the ecologic laws and standards existing in the college English classrooms?3. Why can these non-ecologic problems exist?Questionnaires are the main study instruments of this thesis. They were applied to survey the human environment and the main bodies (teachers and students) of the classroom ecology. The author applied two questionnaires for teachers and students to observe the ecologic factors in the English classroom according to the related ecologic theories and the prior study results especially for the inventory studies contributed by Fraser and other scholars. And then, the author achieved the further certification and modification of the questionnaires to protect their validity and reliability. After that, the author applied the questionnaires to collect data about the human environment and main bodies of the classroom ecology. Besides the questionnaires, the author designed an observation table to make a further study about the classroom ecology. Basing on the questionnaires’content, the author designed a table aiming to check and complete the results of the questionnaires. What’s more, the classroom observation table studied another classroom ecologic factor, the material environment, which did not be involved in the questionnaires too much. The subjects include non-English major freshmen or sophomores, the public English department teachers and English teaching classrooms. They were all chosen from three different rank colleges respectively.292students and30teachers responded the questionnaires. And9English teaching classrooms were chosen to be observed. The data were analyzed by Excel2003and drawings. Descriptive statistics and the note from the classroom observation table were used to show the present situation of each ecologic factor of these colleges’ English classrooms; the relative ecologic theories and standards were conducted to expose the non-ecologic problems; the note from the classroom observation and the relative ecologic theories were taken into consideration to obtain the reasons for the non-ecologic problems; and at last, the research findings, the author’s practical experience and other areas’theories were combined together to discuss the strategies of the development of ecologic English classroom.The research results involve:firstly, the author described the concrete present situation of the college English classroom material environment, human environment and the main bodies. Among all the considered factors, temperature, light, color, classroom scale and equipment etc. belong to the material environment, and teaching content, teaching time, teaching methods and teacher-student relation etc. belong to the human environment, and teacher and student behaviors belong to the main bodies. Secondly, after the comparison between each classroom ecologic factor and the related ecologic theories and standards, the author exposed the non-ecologic factors from the observed factors. Among all the factors, almost all of them do not accord with the ecologic standards except the teacher-student relation factor, such as the classroom scale dose not fit for the Allee’s law, the teaching content and methods do not satisfy the law of tolerance, the most moderate principle and the ecologic classroom’s nature. Therefore, the present situation of the English classroom’s ecology is not satisfied and need further improvement. At last, the author discussed the practical reasons for the non-ecologic problems in classroom also from the material aspect, human aspect and main bodies, such as the deficiency of education investment, the backward ideas of education, the deficiency of studies on educational ecology theories and the improper application of teaching methods, etc.This thesis possesses double significance. The theoretic significance of this study is that it can make contribution to broaden the micro level’s theories of the ecologic education about the quantitative study methods and the empirical study. This study to some extent makes the micro ecologic education theory more practical and systematic. Practically, the results of the study can provide the theoretic guidance and technical support for other researchers’further studies, for society, schools and teachers and students’ecologic classroom improvement and construction. It is necessary to point out that due to the limitation of the author’s study time and capacity, the validity and reliability of the questionnaires and table need to be better verified in the future studies. What’s more, the focus of this thesis is to expose the non-ecologic problems in college English classroom through the combination of the ecologic theories and the empirical study results. The comprehensive understanding and the proper solution of these problems need the future study.