A Case Study On Classroom Communicative Orientation Of Excellent English Teachers In Junior Middle School

Classroom communicative orientation refers to the degree of classroom interaction based on real information exchange in classroom teaching.The most intuitive and important form of classroom communicative orientation is the communication and interaction between teachers and students and among students in class.It meets the requirements of the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011)for the cultivation of students’ communicative competence and influences students’ learning effect in classroom.However,in China,the actual communicative situation of English classes in junior middle school is not ideal.And there are few quantitative researches on the communicative orientation of English classes.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a quantitative research on the communicative orientation of English classes in junior high school.Based on Communicative Language Teaching,Second Language Acquisition and Discourse Analysis theories,this research adopts Case Study method and takes three excellent English teachers of Grade one,Grade two and Grade three respectively and students in their teaching classes in Changzhou Y Middle School as the research participants.Classroom observation and interviews are used as research instruments to collect data.The research mainly answers the following questions: 1.What are the current communicative situations of the three excellent English teachers’ classes? 2.What are the similarities and differences in communicative approaches and classroom communicative characteristics between the three excellent English teachers? 3.Do the classroom communicative approaches taken by the three excellent English teachers meet their students’ expectation?The research results show that: 1.The classroom communicative orientation of the three excellent English teachers’ classes is generally at an intermediate level,and the communicative orientation of the upper-grade classroom is higher than that of the lower-grade classroom.2.The communicative methods taken by the three excellent English teachers and classroom communicative features have both holistic characteristics and unique features.The holistic features are mainly manifested in the teachers’ emphasis on the meaning-focused discourse content and on the use of target language in classroom.They utilize a variety of teaching materials to cultivate students’ listening and speaking skills.In addition,the classroom discourse is basically initiated by the three teachers instead of by students and the form of teachers’ and students’ sustained speech is mainly minimal speech in class.The differences are obvious.With the improvement of students’ language proficiency,the proportion of classroom expression activities,group and individual activities and referential questions designed by teachers of each grade rises.As a consequence,the discourse content controlled by students also increases.3.The communicative methods and teaching philosophy adopted by the three different grades of excellent English teachers basically meet their students’ expectations.But at the same time,the students hope that their teachers can diversify their forms of feedback and increase the number of positive feedback in the classroom.