A Case Study Of The Identity Crisis Of High School Slow Learner Of English

"Slow learners" generally refer to those students who temporarily have difficulties in learning. Suhomlinski (1984) described it as "those students who perceive, comprehend and memorize the learned textbooks with extreme difficulties and extremely slowly:before grasping one thing, it is necessary to conduct learning of another thing; and after just mastering one thing, another thing has been forgotten". In the process of high school English teaching of our nation, there are always a portion of students who fail to ideally accomplish the English-learning tasks of this period. Their intelligence is normal, and they have good grades in other subjects; however, their abilities of English-learning are poor and they have low grades. They lack enthusiasm in English learning, and in class they fail to concentrate and tend to be absent-minded. They feel they are overburdened by the assignments, and lack the confidence for learning English well, and some have even given up foreign language learning. These are what I call the "slow English learners" in this paper.The study subject of this paper was Xiaoming—a second-grade student in a certain high school of Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province. Xiaoming began learning English in his third grade in the primary school and till now he has had a9-year experience of English learning. During the English learning experience over the9years, Xiaoming’s interest for English learning has been extremely low, and the grades of English learning have remained not ideal. From his biographic experience of personal growth, we can see that during Xiaoming’s process of restructuring identity approval, the mental journey, as well as his identity approval as a slow learner plays an important role in the students’learning development.This paper adopts the method of biographic inquiry, and through class observations, interviews, personal life materials (portfolio), files, as well as such research modes as the journals of the teachers’reflections, it conducted case analysis of the growth experience of one high school slow English learner, so as to study the significance of the identity crisis of high school slow English learners on the development of the slow English learners, which can attain to the final goal of English teaching--not to merely master grammatical rules or sentence patterns but to improve students’ comprehensive language abilities, including language knowledge, language skills, affects, cultural understanding and learning strategies, furthermore, grasp the students’ all-round development of body and mind, so as to highlight the "people-oriented" education philosophy. Besides, it can also explore the factors of individuals, school, society and families that influence the progress of the slow English learners, and further propose some methods and countermeasures for dealing with the identity crisis of high school slow English learners.