Action Research Into Re-development Of Tips For Job Interview In Unit 2,Module 11,Advance With English

This study aimed to explore how a pre-service teacher redeveloped Tips for Job Interview in Unit 2,Module 11,Advance with English through action research.The theories bases are input hypothesis and constructivism learning theory.Its theoretical significance is to enrich the existing research on the re-development of teaching materials.Its practical significance is to optimize teaching materials,to improve teaching effectiveness and provide English teachers with specific cases concerning the re-development of teaching materials for reference.The study aimed to explore the three research questions:1.How does the teacher redevelop Tips for Job Interview from the perspective of the structure?2.How does the teacher redevelop Tips for Job Interview from the perspective of the content?3.How does the teacher redevelop Tips for Job Interview from the perspective of the language?The participants in this study were the author and two classes of Grade Three at Suining Senior High School.The author herself was a pre-service teacher who spent her internship in this school.The re-development of the teaching material was carried out under the guidance of the author’s internship instructor.The students have solid English foundation and are interested in English.The teaching material to be redeveloped in this study was the text Tips for Job Interview in Unit 2,Module 11,Advance with English.The text is a lecture transcript giving interview tips to graduating students who search for jobs in their holiday,which involves the tips about what to do before an interview,during an interview and after an interview.The instruments employed in the study mainly involved classroom observation,teaching journal and interview.The action research contained two cycles.The first cycle consisted of problem identification,plan making,plan implementation,assessments and reflections.The second cycle was made up of problem re-identification,plan re-making,plan re-implementation,re-assessments and re-reflections.The data were mainly collected before class,in class and after class,and analyzed by means of classification and comparison.The study has yielded three major findings.Firstly,from the perspective of the structure,coherence was improved in the text through addition of transitional sentence and concluding sentence,replacement of topic sentence;clarity was improved through re-arrangement of the fifth paragraph;compactness was improved through combination of paragraphs with addition of linking words.Secondly,from the perspective of the content:two things were added and extended.One was the introduction of job hunting to increase students’ knowledge about job;the other was self-introduction to enrich their expression about their strengths and weaknesses.Besides,thank-you note and interview strategy were extended to enhance their practical knowledge about interview.Thirdly,from the perspective of the language,the first paragraph was modified to make sentence meaning clear and to highlight the topic;the sentence patterns in the third and sixth paragraphs were modified to make sentences better balanced;the eleventh paragraph was modified to make the logic relation between sentences clear and emphasize the importance of thank-you note.The study had two limitations.Firstly,the sample was not big enough to be generalized to re-development of other teaching materials.Secondly,because the study lacked non-participant observation,the researcher could miss some important information and some details,which might affect the objectivity of the study.