Research On Concept-based Unit Integral Backward Design Of Junior High School English

English Curriculum Standards for Nine-Year Compulsory Education(2022)advocates that English instructional design in practice should emphasize the ways of integrating the whole unit within the same topic,holistically exploring the theme of unit and cultivating the value of moral education.It can be said to be the first time to incorporate the concept of unit design in official document.With this advocacy,all English teachers in elementary education are encouraged to study and analyze all the discourses in a unit within the same topic,and try to integrate or reorganize the unit content so as to better facilitate students’ deep learning.Along with it,it is believed that students’ high-order thinking skills,positive attitudes,and moral judgement can also be developmentally formed.Unfortunately,in teaching practice,many frontline teachers have gradually accepted this new concept of unit integral design but are troubled with the ways of finding the appropriate and effective strategies to implement it in their daily lesson design.Against such backdrop,this study takes unit integral design as the starting-point to explore how the new concept advocated in the curriculum standards can be actualized in teachers’ daily lesson planning.By taking Wiggins & Mc Tighe’s Backward Design(2005)as the theoretical framework,this study intends to explore the following research questions(RQs):1.What is the status quo of Junior high school English instructional design in practice?2.How can the framework of concept-based unit integral backward design be constructed?3.What are the effective strategies used to implement concept-based unit integral backward design in Junior high school English teaching?Based on questionnaire survey,interview,classroom observation and case analysis in the qualitative way,this study finds that for English teachers,the first troubling point is how to design the appropriate teaching objectives of a lesson or even a unit,and their corresponding assessment for they are lack of theoretical guidance for the integral teaching design of units.Teachers are more comfortable with the teaching of fragmentary knowledge points rather than linking the unit as whole.The follow-up assessment of a lesson tends to be more standardization-oriented rather than diversified,dynamic and formative.Under the guidance of concept-based instruction and the procedure of backward design,this study constructed a framework of unit integral design,by highlighting the theme-driven unit concept trees and concomitantly following backward design procedure to emphasize dynamic assessment in a unit.With the case analysis of a group of teaching designs explicitly proclaimed as following unit integral design,this study summarizes different hand-on strategies in implementing concept-based unit integral backward design in Junior high school English teaching: setting concept-driven teaching objectives,using dynamic and multidimensional assessment scales,and designing teaching activities that cultivate higher-order thinking skills.As it is comparatively an initial study on the topic,further empirical research in the classroom context is welcomed.