On Application Of Multiple Intelligence Theory To English Teaching For Senior High School

Howard Gardner came up with Multiple Intelligence Theory(MI theory for short)in 1983 by finding differences in learning abilities from patients with brain trauma.Traditionally,school education emphasizes too much on the development of students' logical-mathematical intelligence and verbal-linguistic intelligence,but which are not the whole of human intelligence.MI theory points out that everyone has eight intelligences,and owns his strong intelligence or combination of intellectual strengths,meanwhile,he has his intellectual weaknesses.It also emphasizes that each student has highlights and is almost talented.In a class,there are big differences among students in regard to strong intelligence and weak intelligence,based on which MI theory has given some educational concepts to the teacher for reference.How to apply the theory into teaching to improve the quality has increasingly become a hot research topic.Nowadays many educators and scholars have been studying it and apply it into practice,among which there are many achievements.In view of the unsatisfactory situation of the current English teaching in school such as the monotonous teaching methods and the spoon-filling teaching mode,which can lower students' interests and confidence and have a negative effect on the teaching quality.The author wants to know whether the result will be good or not if MI theory is applied into English teaching,and then she does an experiment.Firstly,the author conducts a survey about the distribution feature of multiple intelligences in the experimental class.Secondly,the teaching materials is analyzed to design a teaching plan.Thirdly,in the teaching process,the author uses various ways to attract students' attentions,such as watching video,telling story,showing pictures,role-playing,blank-filling,drawing,body language,gesture and so on,which meet the demands of most students,make them have opportunities to utilize their strong intelligences to learn and improve their weak intelligences---verbal-linguistic intelligence,help to excite students' interests and improve their language ability.Finally,the author makes a contrast between pretest and post-test of the experimentalclass and the control class after one-year experiment under the guidance of MI theory,and finds it's valid and essential to take variety of methods in English teaching because it can improve students' interests and teaching effect can be better.