A Survey Study Of English Classroom Environment In Senior High School

Language learning never takes place in a vacuum. It always occurs within a particular context. As language learning, especially foreign language learning, is mainly conducted in classroom settings, creating a positive classroom environment is particularly important for language teachers and learners. The last few decades have witnessed many researches on classroom environment both at home and abroad. However, few empirical studies have been undertaken to investigate the English classroom environment in Senior High School. To fill up this gap, the present study investigates Chinese Senior High School students’perception of their actual classroom environment and expectations for their ideal English classroom environment, compares the actual English classroom environment with the ideal English classroom environment, and explores the relationship between students’perception of the actual English classroom environment and their English language proficiency. To be specific, this study addresses the following questions:1) What is Senior High School students’perception of the actual English classroom environment?2) What are Senior High School students’expectations for the ideal English classroom environment?3) What are the differences between the actual and the ideal English classroom environment?4) What is the relationship between students’perception of the actual English classroom environment and their English language proficiency?To answer the research questions, this study adopts both quantitative and qualitative research designs. The quantitative research includes a questionnaire, which is an updated version of the questionnaires developed and adopted by Jiang (2004) and Sun (2007). It is made up of ten scales and fifty items. The questionnaire survey was administered on December5,2011to Senior Two students from Xinhua High School in Yangzhou and finally327questionnaires were collected with249found valid. The data were analyzed with SPSS17.0.The qualitative research contains semi-structured interviews with six students from three different classes who have all participated in the previous questionnaire survey as well as classroom observations in three classrooms in Xinhua High School. The interviews were conducted individually in the form of free discussion in a conference room while classroom observations were carried out during regular English classes. The information collected from the interviews and observations was synthesized and categorized for further analysis.Detailed analysis of quantitative and qualitative research yields the major findings as follows:Firstly, generally speaking. Chinese Senior High School students are fairly satisfied with their actual English classroom environment as they perceive that most of the elements in their English classroom are acceptable. Some of the elements in the classroom environment are perceived by the subjects as the most satisfactory, for example, Student-student Relationship. Leadership, and Task Orientation. By contrast, some of the elements, such as Student Responsibility, Cooperation and Involvement are regarded as the least satisfactory, among which Involvement is below the acceptable level with a mean score below3.00.Secondly, students have very high expectations for their ideal English classroom environment, for the mean values of all ten scales go beyond the level of4.00. Among them, there are six scales whose mean scores exceed the total mean value:Leadership, Order and Discipline, Student-student Relationship, Task Orientation. Innovation and Equity.Thirdly, there exists a wide gap between the actual and the ideal English classroom environment and students prefer a much more favorable classroom environment than the one they perceive to be actually present. The mean scores for all the ten scales of the actual classroom are lower than the ideal classroom, and the differences between the actual and preferred environment are quite significant (P=.000). The biggest discrepancies exist in the following three scales:Cooperation, Student Responsibility and Involvement.Finally, there exists a positive and significant correlation between students’perception of their actual classroom environment with their English language proficiency. Eight out of ten classroom environment scales are found to be positively and significantly correlated with students’English language proficiency, namely, Teacher-student Relationship. Involvement, Task Orientation, Cooperation, Student Responsibility, Leadership, Equity and Order and Discipline. However, no correlation exists between Student-student Relationship, Innovation and English language proficiency. Based on the discussion of the above findings, some tentative suggestions are proposed for the English teachers on how to improve the present English classroom environment:First, students should be encouraged to take an active part in the English class. To reach this goal, teachers should spare no effort to create a low-anxiety classroom environment where students feel free to express themselves in English with no fear to be judged or laughed at when making mistakes.Second, autonomous learning needs to be promoted in the English classroom. To allow for more independent learning in the classroom, teachers should shift their original role as a controller to a facilitator or a guide, and try to turn their students into responsible and autonomous learners who can take charge of their own study.Third, more cooperative learning is required in the English classroom. It would be advisable for teachers to develop students’cooperative spirit by organizing more group work or pair work in the classroom. Through cooperative work, students can interact with each other and learn from each other, finally making progress as a whole.