Survey On Teaching Level In Middle School English Teachers

Teaching level refers to the intellectual development and knowledge degree where students can reach by acting according to teachers’ requirements and teaching methods. Students acquire knowledge through attention, perception, comprehension, memory, thinking and other positive psychological activities. Teachers put forward specific requirements for students to promote the development of their mental activity. Because of the different requirements put forward by teachers, students’ development in ability and the knowledge mastered vary from person to person. According to the American scholar Maurice·Beagle, teaching and learning can be summed up into three different levels, namely memory, understanding and reflection of teaching, which are complementary, and the latter is usually established on the basis of the previous level. Among these levels, memorizing refers to the level of teaching where teachers only require students to memorize the specific material, and nothing else. Understanding is a level where teachers require students to discover the relationship between individual things and the general principles or discover the use of things. Reflection level is a kind of teaching activity where students take positive thinking and try to solve problems actively under the inspiration and guidance of teachers. The study on these three levels of teaching has an effect on helping students to acquire knowledge and promoting their learning ability, and surely on improving the quality of teaching at the same time.Since the implementation of the new curriculum, though most English teachers have changes or even innovations on teaching method, some English teachers still just ask students to memorize textbooks only without a deep understanding and thinking of the text owing to the pressure from examination and evaluation of teacher performance. This leads students to a situation where they can not flexibly use the knowledge learned before, which has a great impact on their future development in society. Besides, some researchers have a vague understanding of the teaching level, and can not put forward effective teaching strategies from the point of view classroom, teacher development, student development, teacher-student relations. This paper argues that the teaching level of understanding and reflection will not reduce the amount of knowledge that students mastered, but instead, it will extend the time knowledge stored in the brain and actively promote the development of students’ intelligence, thus eventually improve learning efficiency.Data in this paper are collected by taking questionnaires on 80 junior high school English teachers in Zhangjiajie and interviewed 15 teachers. By analyzing the data, three conclusions are listed as follows:l.The teaching level of most junior high school English teachers in Zhangjiajie is at the first level (memory level), with only a small part at the second level (the level of understanding) and third level (reflection level);2.Qualifications, seniority, job title and the school resident jointly affect junior school English teachers’ teaching level in Zhangjiajie;3.Teaching objectives, teaching materials and methods, teaching process and teaching environment greatly affect teachers’ teaching level.The paper also explores the main reasons which make the teachers stay at this level, namely teachers’ pressure from the test policy and performance evaluation, teaching environment of the school, teachers’ knowledge and ability and literacy, and the discipline of English subject itself etc, and finally put forward some views and opinions on how to improve teaching level, that is, follow up teaching ideas---create conditions to guide teachers’ self-development, follow up organizational environment---the government and the community should provide supporting guarantees, follow-up evaluation of teaching philosophy---build diverse teacher evaluation system.