A Practical Research On Differentiated Instruction In Junior High School

In recent years, as the number of students in Junior middle school has increasedyear by year and the number of students in each class has also increased, and thedifferences in students’ English level are far greater than before. However, thetraditional English teaching model in Junior middle school, which applies the sameteaching materials and the same teaching methods to all students, not only makes thestudents in a passive position in the teaching process, but also is bad for thedevelopment of different students’ personality. Based on this situation, we can see thenecessity to put differentiated instruction into English teaching in Junior middle school.Differentiated instruction, which on one hand asks teachers to admit and respect thedifferences between the individual students, on the other hand requires teachers to usedifferent teaching methods to meet different needs of students in different levels. Thepurpose of the approach is to inspire all students’ potential and promote the all-rounddevelopment of all students.The current situation of English teaching in the author’s class is that the numberof students is big and the differences in their English level great too. As a result, theEnglish teaching level can’t be improved for a long time. That’s why the author madeup her mind to put the differentiated instruction into practice. In this paper, the authorwill introduce the definition and the feature of differentiated instruction based on theresearch of the its theory and put the differentiated instruction into practice.The purpose of this research is to improve the current situation of English teaching in Class7, Grade7, in Yangguang Junior High School, Xichang City,Sichuan Province throughapplying differentiated instruction to English teaching. The theoretical framework ofthis research includes the theory of constructivism, the theory of multiple intelligence,taxonomy theory and multiple intelligence theory. And in order to find out the effect ofthis teaching experiment, the author chose a parallel class-Class9, Grade7, as thecontrolled class. Before and after the experiment, two test papers (pre-test paper,post-test paper) were used to investigate students’ performance on Englishachievements. At the same time, there were two questionnaires (that’s to say thepre-questionnaire and the post-questionnaire) used in this study to find out students’learning situation and their feelings of the differentiated instruction before and after theexperiment. According to the statistic analysis of the useful data collected from theexperiment, we could find out that the differentiated instruction is more effective toimprove students’ interests of learning English and their performances on English testthan the traditional teaching mode. As a result, differentiated instruction can promotethe comprehensive development of all students in a more useful way.