| Nowadays the phenomenon of large-sized classes is very common in high schools.There are50students or more in one class. However, the traditional teacher-centeredEnglish teaching approach can not cater for the development of education. With heavyburdens and pressure of college entrance examination, senior English teachers mostlyfocus on the minority of students who do well in English, while inevitably ignore otherstudents. Every student is different from each other in many aspects, such as cognitivelevel, affective factors, and attitude towards the target language. In order to meet thediverse need of learners, differentiated instruction which is based on Gardner’s MultipleIntelligences theory is adopted and implemented.To prove the effectiveness of differentiated instruction, the author carries out anexperimental research in Ganzhou Middle School in Jiangxi province, making senior oneclass9as the experimental class while class15as the control class. Differentiatedinstruction is implemented in the former class, while the traditional teaching methods areapplied to the latter class. The experiment is based on the MI theory which respectsstudents’ individual differences and the whole experiment lasts for one school year. Byanalyzing the results of a series of tests, relative questionnaires and feedbacks from thestudents, the author gets more familiar with the students so as to implement differentiatedinstruction more effectively. The results indicate that differentiated instruction isbeneficial for improving students’ language proficiency as well as their learningmotivation, which in turn helps teachers to achieve better teaching effects. It is a feasibleand effective teaching approach especially in mixed ability classroom. |
