| In order to conform to the need of new era,the Ministry of Education issued The National English Curriculum Standards for Ordinary Senior Education in 2017.The general goal of English curriculum for Ordinary Senior Education is to cultivate and develop students’ core literacy skills,such as language ability,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability.To achieve the new objectives,improving the effectiveness of English teaching is necessary.However,influenced by traditional English teaching methods,the current English teaching cannot achieve effectiveness.Some problems still exist in current high school English teaching,so enhancing teaching effectiveness is becoming urgent.In this study,the author investigated 653 high school students and 53 English teachers from two high schools in Hanzhong.First of all,by reading the relevant literature,the author made reviews on the effective teaching research both at home and abroad,and then the author explained the definitions,teaching strategies,characteristics and criteria of effective teaching.Secondly,with the methods of questionnaire,classroom observation and interview,the author investigated the English teachers’teaching preparation,classroom teaching and teaching evaluation and reflection.Thirdly,the author made a detailed analysis for the results and found out the existing problems in high school English teaching.Then,focusing on these problems,the author gave some specific teaching strategies to improve teaching effectiveness.According to the study,the current high school English teaching has the following deficiencies:(1)Comparatively poor professional quality of teachers:Teachers have improper teaching philosophy and insufficient professional language knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.(2)Insufficiency of teaching preparation:Firstly,teachers have insufficient preparations for their teaching and ignore students’ needs,interests and real situations.Secondly,the teaching objectives are ambiguous and single.Finally,teachers have limited capacity to explore teaching resources.(3)Ineffectiveness of classroom teaching:The teaching contents are boring and single and lack of the characteristics of times.The teaching difficult and important points are not prominent.What’s more,the English teaching methods are simple and the use of the time in classroom teaching is ineffective.In addition,teachers ignore the cultivation of students’ English learning strategies.The classroom atmosphere is too dull to raise student’s learning enthusiasm.In classroom teaching,there is a lack of interaction between students and teachers.Furthermore,parts of teachers’ teaching behaviors,such as skills in management of the classroom,adaptive teaching and asking questions still need to be improved.(4)Simplicity of teaching evaluation and reflection:The methods of evaluation are single and the methods of diagnostic evaluation and formative evaluation are neglected.Teachers seldom write systematic reflections and their ways to reflect are narrow and the reflections are not deep enough.English teachers should adopt the following strategies to improve the effectiveness of English teaching:(1)Teachers should update teaching philosophy and improve professional knowledge and skills.(2)In the aspect of teaching preparation,teachers must set clear and unambiguous teaching objectives,which must meet the actual needs of students.Moreover,teachers should flexibly use teaching materials and explore extra-curriculum resources.(3)Teaching contents must meet students’ needs,interests,and life experience and highlight the important and difficult points.Besides,teaching contents should pay attention to the times and cutting-edge.Teachers should use various teaching methods and establish proper sense of time.In addition,teachers should cultivate students’ learning strategies,including cognitive strategies,control strategies,communicative strategies and resource strategies.Finally,English teachers should create positive and harmonious classroom atmosphere in classroom teaching.(4)In teaching evaluations,teachers should change the functions of evaluation and combine the formative evaluation with summative evaluation together.Teachers can reflect their own teaching in the ways of writing teaching summaries,using students’ feedback and asking other English teachers to make evaluations. |
