A Survey Study On The Classroom Behaviors Of Senior High School Students

In China, the most important approach to Second Language Acquisition is "instructed language acquisition". Therefore, classroom, as the most essential place for learners to learn English, has a great influence on students’English proficiency. Moreover, gender, which is a vital component of individual differences, shares a close relationship with English learning. For the last two decades, numerous scholars have been dedicated to studying individual differences in the process of learning. However, few have paid attention to Senior High School students’ classroom behaviors as well as their gender differences displayed in the classroom.In order to fill up this gap, this paper is undertaken to investigate the general situation of Senior High School students’classroom behaviors through questionnaires, interviews and observation. The research questions addressed in this thesis are:1) What is the general status quo of classroom behaviors presented by Senior High School students? 2) Are there any differences in classroom behaviors between male students and female ones? If yes, what are the differences? 3) What is the relationship between students’classroom behaviors and their English proficiency?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this study. The quantitative research mainly involves a self-reported questionnaire with the whole internal reliability reaching.964. The questionnaires are handed out to 263 Senior One students from Yangzhou High School on April 24th,2014 and finally 258 are found valid. Then, the data is processed by SPSS 16.0. The qualitative research is a non-structured interview with 12 students being selected from those whose questionnaires are considered valid. The interview is carried out in Chinese and the whole process is tape-recorded. Afterwards, the results are transcribed into English and the transcriptions of the interview are carefully analyzed.Detailed analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research yields findings which are presented as follows:Firstly, Senior High School students present a wide variety of classroom behaviors and on the whole, they report frequent display of Support-seeking, Sociability as well as Learning orientation, for the mean scores of these three macro-level categories are all above 4.00. Besides, of the least frequently presented classroom behaviors, Dominating others (M=2.15) comes the first, the mean value of which is lower than that of Self-assurance (M=2.71). In addition, when it comes to the micro-level categories of classroom behaviors, the practices of Taking notes (M=4.91) and Seeking clarification of assignments (M=4.59) within the macro-level category of Support-seeking are perceived to be the most favored. However, in the broad category of Dominating others, the practices of Interrupting the teacher (M=1.55) and Interrupting other students (M=1.60) are the least frequently presented behaviors.Secondly, there do exist gender differences between male students and female ones in the display of classroom behaviors. Generally speaking, male students get higher mean scores than female ones in Verbal participation, Dominating others, Self-confidence as well as Sociality, while female students surpass male ones in Learning orientation, Support-seeking and Self-disclosure. What’s more, the two groups show significant differences in Dominating others (p=.007<.05). Additionally, when the micro-level categories of classroom behaviors are examined, male students differ greatly from female ones in Being serious about coursework (p=.042<.05), Concerning about details (p=.019<.05), Being argumentative (p=.011<.05), Disagreeing with the teacher (p=.011<.05) together with Taking notes (p=.013<.05). Among these, female students prefer Being serious about coursework, Concerning about details, Taking notes, whereas male students favor Being argumentative, Disagreeing with the teacher.Thirdly, there is a significant correlation between Senior High School students’classroom behaviors and students’English proficiency at the 0.01 level. When it comes to the seven macro-level categories of classroom behaviors, Verbal participation/Learning orientation/Support-seeking has a positive correlation with English proficiency at the 0.01 level, whereas there exists no significant correlation between Self-disclosure/Self-confidence/Sociality and students’ English proficiency.In light of the findings, this paper puts forward some pedagogical implications both for teachers and students. For teachers, they should attach great importance to students’classroom behaviors and do their best to encourage students to have a positive attitude towards learning and be actively involved in classroom discussion. Furthermore, teachers are also supposed to pay more attention to the gender differences exhibited by male students and female ones in the classroom. Then personalized teaching methods should be adopted, according to their unique characteristics. For students, it is a necessity for them to realize the importance of classroom learning, take an active part in classroom activities and improve their learning orientation.