An Investigation Into English Homework Designing And Assessment In Junior High School

With the development of the curriculum reform of basic education,the teaching methods and teaching quality of English discipline have ushered in a new round of challenges.Schools not only continue to implement essential content of education,but also infiltrate the task of cultivating students’ English key competences into daily teaching activities.By this way,English teaching could meet the social demands for talents at different levels.There are great achievements on in-class teaching practice.However,there is limited number of research on English homework.English homework has great significance to students’ study and teachers’ teaching.It is not only an important way for students to consolidate their knowledge and improve their autonomous learning ability,but also an important source for teachers to obtain the feedback of students’ learning.As an important part of English teaching,homework is one of the effective way to cultivate students’ key competences.Therefore,it is necessary to study English homework.It will provide new ideas for the reform of English homework,and promote the development of students’ language application ability and key competences.It also has very important meaning for the development of English teaching.The research of English homework adopted the methods of qualitative research and quantitative research.54 English teachers and 405 students were investigated by using the questionnaires and interviews.The teachers and students are selected from three junior high schools in the Kelan county.The main contents of the research including designing,assessment,and feedback of English homework in the current situation.The research focuses on the following two questions:(1)What’s the current situation of the designing of English homework?(2)What’s the state of the assessment and feedback of English homework?Through the analysis,the following findings are presented: English key competences have some influence on the English homework,but it’s not deep enough in general.In the designing of English homework,the designers are too single,and the degree of students’ participation is not high;students and teachers have a unilateral understanding on the purposes of homework;the contents of English homework are more from the textbooks or workbook;the types of homework are varied but the structure is not reasonable;the methods of homework assigning are relatively uniform,and the process lacks of flexibility;the process also neglects to cultivate students’ sense of cooperation and exploration.In the assessment and feedback of English homework,the assessors of English homework are diverse,but the proportion of each subject vary widely,and teachers are still the main assessor of the homework;the methods of assessment are traditional and single.Moreover,there is few attentions given to the feedback of English homework;the whole process of homework feedback is inefficient in most cases.Finally,the thesis also puts forward the corresponding optimization suggestions for the designing,assessment and feedback of English homework based on the English key competences,multiple intelligence theory,and formative assessment theory.The specific implications are as follows:(1)To use versatile materials and optimize structure for homework.(2)To innovate the methods of homework assigning.(3)To improve approaches to assessing English homework.(4)To attach importance to feedback to English homework...