A Study On Student Engagement In English Classroom Teaching In Senior High School

Nowadays, it is well-known that the focus of teacher-centered should be changed into student-centered in the class with the development and advancement of education. Be that as it may, the reality is that teachers are still in the main status in the classroom and students are passive to obtain knowledge in the whole class and be required to practice mechanically in the senior high school. Consequently, the students, indeed, lack the enthusiasm in learning English and have no chance to be engaged in classroom to some extent. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars pay attention to the field of student engagement, meanwhile, most studies of student engagement are in college or junior middle school. Therefore, it is of necessity to make a research on student engagement in English classroom teaching in senior high school, the purpose of which is to change the situation of inactivity of student engagement, and offer some pieces of practical and useful advices.The methods of collecting data in this study include the questionnaires,face-to-face interview and classroom observation. This study is carried out on two hundred and sixty-three students and three English teachers who are chosen in Zhejiang Zhuji No.2 senior middle school. In this study, the questionnaire of student engagement comprises of three components: behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement and affective engagement, and the reliability coefficient of this questionnaire is 0.873. The validity of this study is 0.826 with the instrument of SPSS19.0. The purpose of this study is to figure out the following problems: the situation of the student engagement in the senior high school; the difference on the factor of level of class, gender, and score; the correlation of the three aspects of student engagement.Through the precise calculation with the instrument of SPSS19.0, the main results are obtained as follows:1) The situation of the whole engagement is not as good as expected. Through the descriptive analysis, it can be seen that the cognitive engagement ranks the first place, followed by the behavioral engagement, and the emotional engagement is the last.2) There is significant difference between key class and ordinary class on the factor of behavioral engagement and the anxiety factor. And there is significance between female and male on the aspects of behavioral engagement. There issignificance between the high-score student and middle-score student. From the results, it is obvious that the high-score students are willing to spend more time and concentrate more on learning in comparison with the middle-score students. From the data, it is also shown that there exists significance between high-score student and low-score student on all aspects. Between the middle-score student and low-score student, there is significance on most aspects, and there is still no significance on some specific factors between the middle-score student and low-score student.3) The results indicate that there is positive correlation among all aspects, of which the correlation between cognitive engagement and affective engagement is highest, followed by the behavioral engagement and affective engagement, and the behavioral engagement and the cognitive engagement is the lowest.The above-mentioned findings offer teachers and students some implication for improving the situation. As for teachers, their teaching concept should change from the teacher-centered to the student-centered. Besides, the teaching situation should be created so as to make students be involved in the class; the teaching activities should be meticulously designed to make the students actively take part in the whole class; the atmosphere should be active enough to make the students happily participate in the classroom. As for students, they should cultivate sense of self-consciousness and take pains to be interested in the class.