A Survey On Holistic Unit Teaching Design Pointing To The English Subject Core Competencies In Senior Middle School

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(the Ministry of Education,2022)proposed to implement unit holistic teaching design.Teachers are expected to implement instruction based on unit blueprints and integrate the English core competencies into teaching design.And English Curriculum Standards for Senior High school(the Ministry of Education,2018)also proposed to design holistic unit teaching objectives pointing to the English subject core competencies.(1)This research used survey method,observation method and content analysis method,selecting 30 English teachers from senior high school as the subjects.The purpose of the research is to answer the following two research questions: 1.What is the current design situation of teachers’ holistic unit teaching that points to English core competencies? 2.What problems do the teachers have in their teaching design of holistic unit that points to English core competencies,and what are the reasons for these problems?The investigation is based on the theory of holistic unit design method(Wang,Zhou & Cai,2021).The findings are as follow: 1.Teachers had a high level of understanding on holistic unit teaching design(M>3.5).For the design situation of holistic unit teaching,firstly,the teaching plan and actual classroom teaching were basically consistent.While,compared with the holistic unit teaching design methods,both the teaching plan and classroom observation were lack of the key procedures and contents.Thus,the teachers’ understanding was not consistent with the behavior of holistic unit teaching design.2.The problems in holistic unit teaching design were analyzed from two aspects,understanding and design.In terms of understanding,teachers did not have a deep enough understanding on relationship between English subject core competencies and holistic unit teaching design.At the same time,teachers did not realize that students were also the organic part of holistic unit teaching design.However,after further analysis of the lesson plans and classroom observations at the unit level,it revealed that some teachers’ lesson plans lacked analysis of the students’ needs and unit teaching content.In the lesson design,teachers had difficulties in designing hierarchical and holistic teaching objectives.In the activity design,there was a lack of transfer and innovation activities.In the assessment design,cultural awareness and learning ability were absent from assessment.At last,the reasons for these problems were analyzed from three levels from micro to macro,teachers,collective preparation for lesson in teaching and research office and school training.Teachers believed that there were a lot of teaching contents,while,the teaching time was short,so it was difficult to allocate lesson time.Moreover,teachers have not yet transformed from previous teaching methods.Further analysis of the reasons in collective preparation for lesson,it existed the following problems.Firstly,the content of collective lesson planning was mainly fragmented knowledge.Secondly,the lesson planning process in the subject group was not systematic and lacks guidance.The following reasons existed in school training.The training method was single,only collective training.Then,the training content lacked English subject characteristics and operable procedures.Based on the above research findings,the author puts forward some suggestions on holistic unit teaching design and points out some limitations of this study.