英语专业本科论文范文
A Brief Analysis of english teaching in senior high school
Abstract: Classroom teaching is the main way for students to learn En glish. But in senior high school, a lots of probelms still exsit in t he English teaching especially in the teaching of reading and writing. In this paper, the importance and methods of reading and writing w ill be further discussed. Key words: reading writing techniqu es
Introduction: Classes should be learner-centered, with meaningful, fu nctional activities, often, classes begin by finding out what the stu dents don’t know. These classes operate on the assumption that there is a great deal of information that students lack and that the teache r and textbooks will impact that information to the students. Teacher s who hold this assumption view students as plants waiting passively to be fed and watered. But I think the students should be regarded as explorers, active learners who bring a great deal to the learning pr ocess and at the same time, draw from their environment as they devel op new understandings. The basic principle will be used in the teachi ng of reading and writing.
Section One------ How to teach reading
I. Why teach reading
There are many reasons why getting students to read English texts is an important p art of the teacher’s job. In the first place, many of them want to be able to read texts in English either for their career s, for study purposes or simply for pleasure. Anything we can do to m ake reading easier for them must be a good idea.
Reading texts provide good models for English writing, provide opp ortunities to study language vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and th e way to construct sentences, paragraphs and texts. Lastly, good read ing texts can introduce interesting topics, stimulate discussion, exc ite imaginative responses and be the springboard for well-rounded, fa scinating lessons.
The last but not the least, students must read widely because only a fraction of knowledge about the world can come from other experien ces in their short lives.
II. What kind of reading should students do?
When the teachers give reading class to students, they should noti ce a balance----a balance to be struck between real English on the on e hand and the students’ capabilities and interests on the other. Th ere is some authentic written material which beginner students can un
derstand to some degree: menus, timetables, signs and basic instructi ons, for example, and, where appropriate, teachers can use these. But for longer prose, teachers can offer their students texts, which, wh ile being like English, are nevertheless written or adapted especiall y for their level. Anyway, the materials to be read should be interes ting and meaningful. Teachers should become better acquainted with bo oks written specially for teenagers and dealing with their problems. III. What are the principles behind the teaching of reading?
i) Permit Students To Read
No one has learned to swim by practicing the skills of backstrokes, f lutter kicks or treading water while staying on the edge of the swimm ing pool. Yet, in the teaching of reading teachers often do just that. Rather than let the students into “the water”, teachers keep them in skills books learning rules about letters, syllables or definition s of words rather than letting them into the book itself, permitting them to be immersed in the language which comes from the authors as the readers try to reconstruct the written message.
ii) Encourage students to respond to the content of a reading text, n ot just to the language
Of course, it is important to study reading texts for the way they us e language, how many paragraphs
they contain and how many times they use relative clauses. But the meaning, the message of the text, is mu ch more important. Teachers should help students understand that the main reason to read is for them. They have to have their own purpose to read and reading must make sense, they have to find ways of doing something about it. They should be encouraged either to reread or to continue reading to gain meaning. But they must realize that the mean ing is not in the teacher, but in the interaction between the reader and author. Students should be encouraged to ask themselves repeatedl y, “Does this make sense to me?” Students should be encouraged to r eject and to be intolerant of reading materials that do not make sens e.
iii) Encourage students to guess or predict
Readers’ guesses or predictions are based on the cumulative infor mation and syntactic structure they have been learning as they have b een reading. Therefore, their guesses are more often than not appropr iate to the materials. Students have to realize that risk taking in r eading is appropriate; that using context to decide what words mean i s a proficient reading strategy and that they have the language sense to make appropriate guesses which can fit both the grammatical and s emantic sense of what they are reading.
iv) Match the task to the topic
Once a decision has been taken about what kind of reading text the students are going to read, teachers need to choose good reading tas ks—the right kind of questions and useful puzzles, etc. Asking borin g and inappropriate questions can undermine the most interesting text; the most commonplace passage can be made really exciting with imagin ative and challenging tasks. Working in groups, the English teacher a nd students take turns asking each other questions following the read ing. The teacher may ask, “ What is the significance of the characte r’s age?” These questions require inferences based on details from the reading text.
Section Two------How to teach writing (Developing correctness in stud ents’ writing)
“Students learn to write by writing, and they learn to write co rrectly by writing, revising, and proofreading their own work”---wit h some help or direction from the teacher when it is necessary. They do not learn to write correctly by studying about writing or doing is olated workbook exercises unrelated to their own writing. So, the mos t important technique a teacher can use to guide students toward gram matically correct writing is to let them write, let them write things related to their own experiences. There is no limit to the kinds of text the teacher can ask students to write. Teachers’ decisions, tho ugh, should based on how much language the students know, what their interests are.
“Do I read a paper and ignore all punctuation, what good is that for students
We spend hours at night with papers---I’m not sure the students get as much from it as the time I spend on it.”
These comments by senior high school English teachers discussing the process of marking student papers reflect the dissatisfaction an d frustration of many teachers over the problem of dealing with the e rrors in student writing-----the obvious mistakes in spelling, punctu ation----Traditionally, teachers have worked to correct errors in two ways: by teaching grammatically correctness through exercise in gram mar texts; by pointing out all errors when making student papers.
Most students find it very dispiriting if they get a piece of wr itten work back and it is covered in red ink, underlings and crossing -out. It is a powerful visual statement of the fact that their writte n English is terrible. Of course, some pieces of written work are com pletely full of mistakes, but even in these cases, the teacher has to achieve a balance between being accurate and truthful on the one han
d and treating students sensitively and sympathetically on th
e other.
Some techniques can be used in dealing with the errors in studen t papers:
i) Selectivity
Rather than engage in intensive error-correction when responding to s tudent writing, teachers are encouraged to adopt a more moderate appr oach to error. If the teacher over-corrects the students’ mistakes, the students would be likely to focus on errors instead of ideas. Stu dents are more likely to grow as writers when the teacher’s primary purpose in reading student papers is to respond to content. However, if attention to content and correctness are combined when making pape rs, it is more helpful to select one or two kinds of errors the indiv idual student is making than to point out every error in the paper. T he teacher can identify a selected error, show an example or two on t he student paper, and either explain the correct form or direct the s tudent to a handbook for further explanation. It is always worth writ ing a comment at the end of a piece of written work -----anything fro m “Well done” to “This is a good story, but you must look again at your use of past tenses---see X grammar book page xx.”
ii) Error-analysis
Another method for working with student error, one that can be especi ally fruitful for teachers, is to approach it from an analytic perspe ctive. Teachers, as error-analyst, look for patterns in the errors of an individual student, tries to discover how the mistake arrived at the mistakes by analyzing the error (
Lack of knowledge about a certai n grammatical point; A careless one or a mis-learned rule?), and plan s strategies accordingly.
英语专业论文题目iii) Publish Student Writing
The final basic strategy is publishing. Students need a reason for la boring over a draft until it is perfect; the urge to see oneself in p rint can be a powerful drive toward revision and proofreading.
Conclusion: As teachers to the students who are in senior high sch ool, they shoul d learn to turn students’ hard work toward supporting the language strengths students already have, proving students with a feeling of success, finding materials and planning classroom experie nces will turn students on to reading and writing, the reading and wr iting will develop with much greater ease than it does at the present time.
Reference:
Gu Xueliang, The Basic Technical Training in English Teaching, Hangzh ou University Press, 1998.
Wilga M.Rivers & Mary S. Temperley, A practical guide to the teaching of English as a second or foreign Language, New York: Oxford Univers ity Press, 1978
Smith F. Understanding Reading (2d ed), New York: Holt, Rinehart an d Winston, 1978
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