Research On The Use Of Project Section In Advance With English

Nowadays, Project section in Advance with English has become one of the highlights. Itnot only upholds the conception of Project-based Learning, but also matches with therequirements from Ordinary High School New English Curriculum Standards: developinglearners’ abilities of autonomous learning and cooperative learning; improving skills ingathering and processing information; analyzing and solving problems in English. The seriesof textbooks has been popularized in Hunan for five years, but though searching relevantliterature and investigations the writer finds that Project section has not been fully utilized inteaching practice. Thus, it is quite necessary for us to investigate and analyze the problemsand the difficulties existing in using the new section in practice.This research starts from defining the terms such as Project, Project-based Learning andProject-based Language Learning, gives a view of related literatures about Project-basedLearning and outlines the design features and teaching objectives of Project Section inAdvance with English. Then investigations on the use of Project Section in Advance withEnglish in three high schools of Xiangtan (Xiangtan NO.1Middle School, Xiangtan NO.3Middle School, Yunlong Experimental Middle School) have been conducted throughquestionnaires and interviews, which include:(1) What are the teachers’ and students’attitudes towards Project section?(2) What are teachers’ and students’ evaluation to thecontents of Project section?(3) How do teachers and students deal with Project section(including parts A and B) in practice?(4) Are there any difficulties or problems in teachingand learning Project section? If there are, what are they?After discussing and analyzing the collected data from investigations and interviews byExcel2003, the writer finds: a majority of the teachers accept the designer’s intent of Projectsection, and realize that doing the project activities is good for developing students’ overalllanguage proficiency. However, owing to the limited teaching periods, the current collegeentrance examination system, teachers’ traditional concepts, and students’ limited languagelevel, the teachers and the students consider that Part A of Project section is too difficult, and they go it through quickly and roughly. As for Part B, only few of them are enthusiastic aboutcarrying out the project activities in English class once in a while, normal teaching methodsare adopted without corresponding evaluation mechanism.Therefore, at the end of the thesis the writer puts forward some suggestions for thetextbook writers, teachers, and students: it is necessary to give teachers more instructions andguidance in teaching Project section, and it is teachers’ obligation to update their teachingconcepts, change their roles in teaching Project section, upgrade their own professionalaccomplishment, use the section in a more suitable and creative way, make full use of allkinds of teaching methods and strategies according to the features of Project section, adoptcorresponding evaluation mechanism to Project section, then perfect Project section teaching.Besides, it is students’ duty to change the traditional learning styles into developingautonomous learning and try to become active learners.