An Investigation Into The Implementation Of The Activity-Based Approach In Senior High School's English Reading Teaching

The Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards(2017 edition)emphasizes developing students' English subject core competences,advocating that teachers should actively practice the activity-based approach to promote the effective formation of students' core competences.Reading lesson is the main lesson type in senior high school's English teaching,which plays an important role in cultivating students' English subject core competences.Therefore,it's particularly important to practice the activity-based approach in English reading teaching.At present,most of the research on the activity-based approach and English reading teaching focuses on teaching design,but there is little research which investigates the current situation of the implementation of the activity-based approach in reading teaching,which leaves research space for this thesis.This study adopts questionnaire,classroom observation and interview to investigate the teachers in a senior high school in Chengdu,aiming to answer the following questions:(1)What's the current situation of senior high school English teachers' understanding of the activity-based approach?(2)What's the current situation of the implementation of the activity-based approach in senior high school's English reading teaching?(3)What are the group differences in the implementation of the activity-based approach between different groups of English teachers?(4)What are the factors influencing the implementation of the activity-based approach?The findings show that(1)teachers don't have a clear understanding of the activity-based approach.There still is much room to improve;(2)the current situation of the implementation of the activity-based approach in senior high school's English reading teaching is not optimistic.From the perspective of text interpretation,the majority of the teachers pay much attention to interpreting the surface information of the text,ignoring to interpret the underlying information.From the perspective of teaching content,teachers pay much attention to explaining the language knowledge and cultivating students' cultural awareness,ignoring the cultivation of thinking quality and learning ability.Besides,most of the teachers don't pay attention to the integration of the course contents,and the exploration of thematic meaning is ignored by them.From the perspective of assessment,most of the teachers will comprehensively use summative assessment and formative assessment to evaluate students.But,teachers fail to assess students according to their performance on the English subject core competences.From the perspective of the learning activities that teachers design,teachers pay far more attention to the comprehension activities,while the application activities and innovation activities are inadequate;(3)about the group differences in the implementation of the activity-based approach between different groups of teachers,there is no significant difference between the teachers with different genders and different educational levels.But there are significant differences between the teachers with different positional titles and teaching years.From the perspective of positional title,the teachers owning first-grade positional title do much better in practicing the activity-based approach than other groups of teachers.From the perspective of teaching years,the teachers with 11-20 years' teaching experience do much better in practicing the activity-based approach than other groups of teachers;(4)many factors affect the implementation of the activity-based approach.Teachers' lack of theoretical knowledge about the activity-based approach,teachers' lack of relevant practical guidance,teachers' heavy workload and pressure,the current assessment system and large class scale all are the factors.Based on the findings of this study,the author gives the following suggestions: firstly,teachers should actively study the activity-based approach and deep their understanding of the activity-based approach,and then they should actively apply it in their reading teaching practice.Secondly,teachers should do careful text interpretation,and the learning activities that they design should center on the thematic meaning.Thirdly,schools should provide teachers with some practical guidance on how to practice the activity-based approach in English reading teaching,and experts' guidance should be strengthened.Lastly,our country should continuously improve the educational assessment system to guarantee that the activity-based approach can be implemented smoothly.