A Study On Middle School Students’ Engagement In English Class

With the gradual development of new curriculum reform, teaching philosophy also has changed in practical teaching. New curriculum standard has changed the traditional teaching philosophy----"knowledge-centered", it has emphasized to establish the new teaching philosophy----"student-centered". In daily teaching, teachers often focus on the input of knowledge while they ignore the students’ engagement in class. As one of the most important elements in teaching process, student engagement not only has a significant effect on the efficiency of teaching, but also has the same great effect on students’ learning. Therefore, the study of student engagement is quite important to both teachers and students. In classroom teaching, students can engage in class actively, which will highly enhance the teacher’s working efficiency, so the teacher should take some strategies to make students engage in class actively and improve the teaching efficiency, finally, students’ learning achievement will be improved. Student engagement is usually expressed in a variety of ways, such as answersing teacher’s questions, questioning actively, discussing in group, taking notes and so on, but these are students’ behavioral engagement.In class, student engagement includes not only behavioral engagement but also cognitive engagement and affective engagement. Behavioral engagement consists of concentration, intensive study and extracurricular study time. Cognitive engagement includes surface strategy, deep strategy and reliable strategy. Affective engagement includes the sense of enjoyment, success, anxiety and boredom. Nowadays, more and more scholars have paid attention to the student engagement, they have done many in-depth studies on student engagement, these studies involve pedagogy andpsychology, even some intersectional subjects, such as educational psychology. All thesestudies have profound guiding significance to the practical classroom teaching. However,these studies mainly focus on the elementary schools, senior high schools and universities,few of them involve the middle school students’engagement. For this situation, this thesis hasdone the research on middle school students’ engagement in English class, then using theconclusions of analysis, finally, the author puts forward corresponding suggestions to promotemiddle school students’ engagement in English class. Then the suggestions maybe canprovide the theoretical instruction for the practical English teaching.This thesis does a study on the student engagement in English class in No.11MiddleSchool of Wanbailin in Taiyuan. The theoretical model of this study is based on KongQiping’s theories of student engagement. The author mainly adopts three kinds of researchmethods: questionnaire, interview and classroom observation. The purpose is to investigateand analyze the current situation of students’ engagement, then the effects of studentengagement on learning results are also been explored. This thesis does some researches onstudents’ engagement from the following aspects: behavior, cognition and affection, mainlyanalyze and discuss the following four questions:(1)What’s the current situation of students’engagement in middle school?(2)Are there any differences between male and female’sengagement in class?(3)Are there any differences among high achievers, medium achieversand low achievers?(4)Is there a relationship among middle school students’ behavioral,cognitive and affective engagement?The results are showed as follows. The current student engagement of middle schoolstudents is quite low. There is not a notable difference between female and male students, butthere exist a significant difference in students’ learning achievement. There exist remarkablecorrelation among students’ behavioral, cognitive and affective engagement. At last, thisthesis suggests some ways to promote middle school students’ engagement in English class:Designing the teaching elaborately; Cultivating students’ interests; Teaching students inaccordance with aptitude; Establishing the new evaluation system; Changing teaching ideas;Providing appropriate feedback to students; Building a good teaching environment.