A Case Study On The Current Teaching Situation Of Integrative Unit Teaching From Activity-based View Of English Learning In Grade 10

The 2017 version of the new English curriculum standard puts forward the concept of Activity-based View of English Learning(AVEL),aiming to promote students’ comprehensive development through learning and understanding activities,application and practice activities,transformation and innovation activities.Integrative Unit Teaching(IUT)is of interest in current English teaching,it breaks away from traditional English teaching which often be criticized for being disconnected from the context,and plans teaching activities around the unit theme.Previous research proves the AVEL and the IUT have their own advantages,many focus on the interpretation of the concepts and the application in certain modules,such as listening or speaking classes.However,few studies apply the AVEL as an overarching concept to integrate the divided modules of unit in teaching,the influence on the combination of two concepts is not yet clear.Will the IUT based AVEL advocated by new curriculum be welcomed by teachers and students in high school? Will this mode help to develop students’ core literacy?This study takes an English teacher and her class of grade 10 from a key school in Hubei as the research participants,aiming to explore situation of the IUT based AVEL,the problems encountered and the support needed.Classroom observation and interviews are employed as the main data collection channel.The author firstly records the amount and time of the three types of module activities among the eight units through the classroom observation scale.Then interviews with the teacher and students are conducted respectively to understand their attitudes and difficulties encountered in daily teaching practice.In order to acquire representative and reliable feedback,six students are selected from three levels,low,medium,and high,according to their high school entrance examination results.Finally,the specific analysis of three units activities are deeply analyzed,functioned as a close lens into the teaching procedures and effects.Meanwhile some constructive suggestions are provided for the teacher to improve her classroom teaching.The results report the daily teaching situation of the IUT based AVEL,and prove this mode beneficial to students’ core literacy,including language competence,learning ability,thinking quality and cultural awareness.The teacher participant indeed organizes unit theme related activities in each module of eight units.However,there still are some problems : 1.The amount and time of activities are not evenly distributed,transformation and innovation activities tend to be neglected.2.Some of application and practice activities,transformation and innovation activities are relatively difficult,which discourages low level students’ participation.3.Instrumental knowledge teaching outweighs humanistic knowledge teaching,which ultimately leads to the disconnection between grammar modules and unit topics.4.Some activities are not organized in the right sequence to fit students’ cognitive development.5.Instructions are not appropriate to develop students’ independent thinking ability.Based on the needs of the frontier teacher and empirical data,this research tentatively provides suggestions for classroom teaching and calls for support from policy makers,school authorities,experts and parents.In summary,this research proves the feasibility of the IUT based AVEL in high school classroom,provides a reference example for high school English teachers who implement this mode,and points out a future direction for research on this topic in the later period.