Study On The Influence Of English Unit Integrative Teaching In Middle School On English Core Competencies

With the change in social and economic development for talent demand and the development of globalization,English,as a global language,plays an irreplaceable role in politics,economy,culture and society.Education reflects the need of the Times.Recently,China has emphasized that English teaching should aim at cultivating students’ Core Competencies to satisfy the need of the Times.At the 10 th National Symposium on effective teaching theory and practice with the theme of “unit teaching design based on core literacy” held in December 2015,many scholars proposed that the Unit Integrative Teaching is an effective method to cultivate students’ English Core Competencies.It makes more and more scholars begin to think about how to carry out the Unit Integrative Teaching in practical teaching.With the development of practice,many teachers encounter some practical problems that can not be ignored in the implementation of the English Unit Integrative Teaching,which makes our in-depth research on unit integrated teaching extremely urgent.This paper focuses on three questions:(1)what is the current status of the English Unit Integrative Teaching in middle school.(2)Can the English Unit Integrative Teaching cultivate students’ English Core Competencies?(3)What difficulties and problems are the English teachers and students facing in the application of the English Unit Integrative Teaching? In this paper,two classes of ninth-grade students(92 students in total)from a middle school in Wuhan,Hubei Province,were chosen as the subjects of the study.Questionnaires,interviews,and tests were adopted as the research tool,and during the four-month teaching experiment,the control group adopted the traditional classroom teaching design,while the experimental class adopted the English Unit Integrative Teaching.Meanwhile,five English teachers are interviewed.This study took the People Education Edition Grade 9(whole book)textbook as an example and designed a teaching case of the English Unit Integrative Teaching based on the English Core Competencies,in order to provide some references and suggestions for the current English teachers to enhance the cultivation of English Core Competencies in their teaching.The results of the study show that many teachers have carried out the practice of the English Unit Integrative Teaching under the efforts of the teaching and research group,but due to the lack of theoretical support and practical experience of the teachers,and the influence of traditional teaching methods and exam-oriented education,teachers encountered some difficulties and problems when implementing the practice teaching,such as insufficient teaching design,biased teaching objectives and inadequate analysis of the students analysis,etc.Students also face problems such as "not being able to follow" and "not being able to adapt" in the English Unit Integrative Teaching,and the English Unit Integrative Teaching needs to be further improved;at the same time,the English Unit Integrative Teaching has a certain effect on improving students’ English Core Competencies,and students who received the English Unit Integrative Teaching have a greater improvement than before,especially in the two aspects of learning attitude and cultural awareness.