The Research On After-class Tasks Design In Senior English Teaching Based On Monitor Theory

In China,English learners can't practice English in daily life for the absence of language environment.Learners in senior high school trying to further improve their language ability are faced with great pressure.In response to the lack of English environment after class,it becomes essential that teachers should design reasonable after-class tasks to help senior high students be further exposed to the language,apply it to life and consolidate the language as they find much difficulty in mastering the language without language environment.And the monitor theory proposed by Krashen is aimed at making the language acquisition more easily and better by affecting the learning process of language.The five hypotheses making up the monitor theory have a great effect on second language acquisition as well as foreign language acquisition.Among them,the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and the Affective Filter Hypothesis can give teachers some implication on how to design after-class tasks.Therefore,the author wants to explore whether the task designs conform to the ideas of the monitor theory and whether they help students in FLA.This research aims to investigate the current situation of teachers' design of after-class tasks in Senior High English teaching.It tends to find out the preferred types of after-class tasks designed by teachers,evaluate the correlation between the task design and the monitor theory and discuss the improvement teachers can make to the after-class tasks.The participants of the research are the senior high English teachers working in the author's school(19 teachers in all).Upon the sample choice,the study takes sexes and ages into consideration and finally selects seven teachers to have seven face-to-face interviews.After the interviews,the author analyzes the data she has collected and evaluates them within the framework of Monitor theory.It tends to find whether the input of the tasks is fit for the “i+1” standard and predict whether the after-class tasks can help stimulate students' motivation,promote students' self-confidence and ease their anxiety in English learning.Afterwards,to avoid the vague description even some misunderstanding in communication,the author chooses one teacher whose design is mostly related to the monitor theory from the seven interviewees to make a micro case study in form of classroom observation.As the lesson is to check students' after-class tasks,through which the actual procedure could be understood and meanwhile interviews with some students can be done to know about their affective states.The research shows that five types of after-class tasks are commonly adopted,such as oral presentation,movie review,poster design,extensive reading and role play;nearly all of the designed tasks attempt to offer students some input of “i+1” standard and they vary in affective filter;detailed check points should also be included in the design of after-class tasks as improvement of task designs.However,the limitation of this research is apparent.The samples are still limited and there are no adequate ways to investigate how teachers put forward tasks.In the future study,the drawbacks need to be dealt with by following-up classroom observation of a teacher or two for a whole year.