Recently, I had a six-week's internship as an English teacher of senior one in Hangzhou NO.3 Middle School, during which I established a close relationship with my students and learned quite a lot of practical skills about English teaching and class management. It is one of my most unforgettable memories, which will nourish me in the following years. While I also discovered some significant problems in my teaching experience that I believe should be resolved in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency in English teaching and learning.
Firstly, the all-English teaching method is not the optimum way in some senior schools. Before we took the internship, we had been taught repeatedly that we should and must try our best to teach students in English through the whole class, because a good language environment is a crucial factor to the success of English learning, and the all-English teaching method can help expose the students to this environment and therefore improve the their learning effect. However, things seems to go in a contrary way, according to my internship experience. When I taught my students whole in English in the class, they turned to be a little confused and many of them could not fully understand what I taught. But the more Chinese I used in the class, the students turned to be more active and have a better performance in their homeworks and exams. The other teachers also came across the same problem as me. Later, we all agreed that this method was not practical in Hangzhou NO.3 middle for the following reasons: the English level of most students is not good enough to help them learning in a all-English class; few students are really interested in English learning; the teachers rarely teach students in an all-English way and can not apply it to its full effectiveness.
Secondly, more and more students are not interested in or even hate English learning. Though English is one of the most important subjects in the College Entrance Examination, most students I meet do not show any interest in it to the extent that learning English is a kind of suffering for them and they just seize every opportunity to get away from it. As a result, only 10 students pass in the first English exam. There are several reasons for this phenomenon: the most important one is that they do not lay a solid foundation in the previous English study. So they find English is such a difficult subject that they lose confidence and interest in it and then they do worse in it. It is a vicious circle; a good teaching method may stimulate students' interest in English learning, while most teachers I meet fail to do it; the huge burden and homework that most students bear also rob their interest in English.
Finally, most students are learning English in an improper and inefficient way. This is what I believe the basic reason for their poor performance in English learning. You can never imagine that some students can write a whole passage from memory, but they are unable to read it out! They just recite it word by word as strange symbols. This is mainly because they do not master the correct usage of phonetic symbols and rarely spend time practising reading English. Another improper learning aspect is that they get used to copy the answer from the others and do not think about why the answer is true when they come across any problem. They are also inactive in the English class and spend many time on learning what they missed on the class. Most of them never do anything about English beyond what their teachers tell them on class.
These problems all contribute to the difficult situation that faced with the English teaching and learning in Hangzhou NO.3 Middle School. They can only be solved by the co-effort of the school, the teachers and the students. 下载本文