The Main Problems In High School Chinese Large Unit Teaching And Strategies To Solve Them

As early as in the Chinese Curriculum Standards for General High Schools(2017Edition),the "Core Literacy of Chinese Subject" was explicitly stated a guide to the goals of Chinese Teaching.The "big ideas of discipline" are also proposed,i.e."emphasis should be placed on structuring curriculum content with the big ideas of the subject as the core".The Chinese Curriculum Standards for General High Schools(2017 Edition Revised 2020)continues to emphasize these two aspects.At the same time,the unified version of the senior secondary language textbook based on the new standards has been put into use.The new textbook adopts a two-pronged approach of "humanities themes" and "learning task clusters",highlighting the holistic nature of the units.In this context,the large unit teaching was born,which has gained the attention of some experts,scholars and front-line teachers.Later,the Compulsory Education Curriculum Programme(2022 Edition)explicitly proposes to "explore large unit teaching",and large unit teaching has gradually become a hot spot for educational research,and a wave of large unit teaching research has been launched.While large unit teaching is gaining attention and gradually entering the high school language classroom,many researchers have found that there are many problems in large-unit teaching: firstly,teachers’ awareness of big concepts is weak,which makes large units lack big concepts and are thus loosely integrated;secondly,teachers downplay language knowledge,resulting in the creation of activities that lack the core of knowledge;thirdly,teachers lack guidance for students’ learning,making it difficult to obtain feedback from students in teaching;fourthly,large units are difficult to implement,and although teachers are given teaching autonomy,the power given to them is beyond their control.The difficulty of implementing large units of instruction is that,although they give teachers autonomy,the power they are given is beyond their control and can lead to a waste of that autonomy.The successful implementation of large unit teaching is,on the one hand,limited by the ability of teachers and,on the other hand,closely related to whether the teaching reality can support the implementation of large-unit teaching.It is therefore necessary to examine the large units themselves in senior secondary schools and to explore how teachers can carry out large units in senior secondary languages.Organic philosophy,a new philosophy gradually developed in the first half of the20 th century by the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead(1861-1947).It has been endorsed and praised to varying degrees by philosophers,logicians,educationalists,religious scholars,ecologists,psychologists,management scientists,and even some economists,jurists and physicists.The "process principle" is the first and most fundamental principle of Whitehead’s process philosophy.The "relevance principle" is also one of the basic principles of organic philosophy.Both of these principles provide inspiration and ideas for solving the problems in teaching large units of language in high school: Firstly,when promoting the teaching of large units,policy makers should,firstly,steadily explore and respond to the spirit of the standards and the content of the textbooks;secondly,they should take small steps forward,taking into account the situation of teachers and students in different regions.Secondly,when teachers are teaching large units,they should,firstly,refine the concepts of language from the bottom up;secondly,teach language knowledge by integrating it into practical language activities;and thirdly,guide students’ learning by both teaching and teaching to promote learning.This paper is organized into five chapters:The first chapter of the paper focuses on the rationale for the selection of the topic;a literature review on the three themes of large unit teaching,large unit language teaching and two principles of organic philosophy;a conceptual definition of large-unit teaching and large-unit language teaching;clarification of the multi-dimensional significance of this research at both the theoretical and practical levels,and an identification of the innovative aspects of the paper.The second chapter focuses on the theoretical foundations of the study,namely the process and relevance principles of Whitehead’s organic philosophy.The third chapter focuses on the research theme of large unit language teaching,and clarifies its theoretical underpinnings by defining its concepts and the history of its development and changes in a holistic manner.The fourth chapter uses the literature analysis method,using knowledge base resources such as China National Knowledge Internet and DUXIU Network and library resources to review relevant materials on large-unit teaching in high school languages.After selection,excerpt and analysis,the main problems of large-unit teaching in high school languages in China are sorted out at present.The fifth chapter examines the large unit teaching of high school languages based on the process and relevance principles of Whitehead’s organic philosophy,and proposes strategies for optimizing the large unit teaching of high school languages in terms of how policy makers can promote large unit teaching and how teachers can carry out large unit teaching.