An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of Role-play Teaching On Students' English Motivation In Junior Middle School

In 2011,the Ministry of Education published new textbooks for students in junior middle school.It aims to cultivate the preliminary comprehensive language using ability,improving mental development and personal quality of humanities.The New Standard English emphasizes unification of instrumentality and humanity in English curriculum.The revised curriculum pays more attention to improving students' communicative ability.Also,students should be cultivated to develop their ability to gather and process information,to analyze and solve problems,and the ability to communicate and cooperate.The term “role play” is a kind of teaching method which represents and expresses experience by giving students more opportunities to practice the target language and to perform in the classroom or exchanging different roles to experience a situation or solve some problems that may happen in the reality.It needs students to simulate a context,do pair work,play roles and so on.Furthermore,there are the four main types of English class in junior middle school: listening and speaking class,grammar class,reading class and writing class.Concerned about the feasibility of experiment,the author will choose two experimental classes to teach reading class and speaking class in junior middle school to probe out which types of classes are fit for role-pay and what kinds of role-play can motivate the students' interests effectively.Based on researches on role-play at home and abroad,this study mainly discusses the influence of the role-play on English learning motivation in junior middle school.In the process,the author took role-play in the experimental class while in the control class students learned by the traditional methods.In the research,the author adopted questionnaires and interviews to discover the influence of the role-play on English learning motivation.The study aims to answer the following three questions: 1.Compared with traditional teaching methods,how will the teaching method “roleplay” influence students' English learning motivation in junior middle school? 2.Which pattern of role-play can motivate the students' interests more effectively? 3.Which type of class is the more suitable for using role-play to improve the students' motivation?The study lasted for 3 months,about 12 weeks.The 54 participants are all from a middle school in Westlake district of Hangzhou city.This is a public school.They are all in Grade 8.Each class has 27 students.Before the experiment,the 54 participants were asked to take the examination and the English learning motivation questionnaire.It is found that there is no significant difference in English achievement test before the experiment.In the process of the experiment,the teacher,the teaching time and teaching textbooks are the same for the two classes except the activity “role-play”.One of the classes is experimental class where the rearranged activity “role-play” based on the real-life situations would be taken.The other is the control class where the traditional method would be taken.During the experiment,the author would observe the behaviors of students and found the differences of students.students were asked to take the mid-term examination held by the school and the English learning motivation questionnaire.At the same time,students and the English teacher was interviewed about the changes of English learning motivation.After analyzing the data with SPSS 22.0 and Excel,the researcher makes the following conclusions:1)Role-play is an effective way to arouse students' internal motivation to English learning.2)Half-controlled role play is more suitable for English Teaching.3)Role play can arouse students' learning motivation more effectively in English speaking and listening class.