A Study On The Problems With Advance With English And Its Use In Hunan Rural Senior High Schools And The Countermeasures

The current English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School (draft) issued by the Ministry of Education in April,2003points out a clear direction for English teaching in Senior High School.Advance with English has been officially used as the English textbook for Senior High Schools for about eight years in Hunan Province. The textbook has aroused different responses among the users, especially among rural senior high schools.Due to the large percentage of the rural senior high schools in Hunan, the survey on the using situation of Advance with English in rural areas plays an important role in the teaching quality.This thesis analyzes and evaluates the textbook from the external as well as internal angles. By means of the introduction and textual analysis of its content and structure, and finished with questionnaires and the class teaching observation over teachers and students of four different rural senior high schools in Liling, Hunan, we have found out some problems and puzzles existing among them and try to help them out of trouble.Proceeded with questionnaires on the present using situation of Advance with English in the four schools,we have found out some problems related to the textbook itself. First, the low words repetition between different modules makes it much harder for the students to memorize the new words; second, the instructions of Task and Project are too long and a little challenging to understand,which fails to arouse their studying interest in the subject of English; third, some parts,such as Welcome to the unit, Task, Project and Self-assessment, are designed too ideally and divorced from the practical level of the rural schools.Teachers in rural senior high schools have lots of common puzzles, that is, how to deal with Welcome to the unit properly because of lack of class periods and the few students’ participations and their poor command of oral English, how to deal with grammatical items appearing in the reading materials in advance of the schedule of the textbook, how to deal with Project because of the backward software and hardware facilities in the rural schools, and how to give proper instructions during its process.Students in rural areas feel that the vocabulary in Advance with English is much larger than that in junior English books, which makes it harder for them to memorize new words and much easier to forget them mostly because of words’low repetition chances in different modules; most of them, especially boy students, show little interest to the subject of English; and the students’attitudes towards English and learning methods of English also need to be guided.Based on a series of surveys some countermeasures are put forward accordingly.In order to make full use of the textbook in actual teaching, its compilers are expected to improve the deficiency, teachers to improve their professional quality and fully absorb the concept of New Curriculum, students expected to change the traditional passive way of learning and cultivate the habit of self-study and education authorities to strive to set a new education evaluation system;.only in these ways can the textbook be carried out smoothly under the guideline of The current English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School.