Research on Improving College English Classes

Abstract:This essay is based on observation of totally four classes given by two teachers. Through careful observation, real tape-recordings, detailed notes and serious comparison of their classes, the observer wants to find the different approaches and methods they use, and how they give the classes while they are with different teaching experience, and finally what the reactions of students are.

Keywords:class；observation；teacher；student；active；text；homework questions

中图分类号： H319文献标识码: A文章编号：1672-1578（2009)5-0013-03

1 Research questions

What approaches and methods do different teachers with different teaching practice use?

How do teachers with different levels of teaching experience give the classes? Are there any changes between the two classes for one teacher?

What are the reactions of students in the totally four classes?

2 Subjects

Nowadays,“China needs a pool of citizens competent in English to meet its economic needs and to push forward its economic progerss, as knowledge of English can not only attract investment from the developed industrial nations, but also enable China to gain access to the scientific and technological expertise from the develop nations…The information society of the 21st century needs proficient bilingual speakers……For individuals, being bilingual is also to gain employment to work locally for international and multinational corporations, to conduct international businesses, to gain affluence and status, to work and travel abroad. Thus it is indispensable for China to have large numbers of compete bilingual speakers to enter the global village of the 21st century.” (Yu 3)

Students in universities in China are facing the pressure to pass CET-4, so learning excellent English is necessary for them. This requires good listening, reading, translating and writing skills. What’s more, they also need good spoken English to communicate with foreigners. Here comes the problem: how can students learn English well? What can teachers do to help them?

The subjects here are two teachers teaching college English in a privately-funded college, one is David, the other is John. They are both male. David is 45 years old with about 20 years’ experience of teaching English, and he has been abroad in England for 2 years to finish his postgraduate courses, while 27-year-old John is just graduated as a postgraduate in a famous university in Guangzhou.In this observation task, there are separately two classes of the two teachers, about the same texts: unit 2 “Deep Concern” and unit 7 “Face to Face with Guns” in the book “New Horizon College English 1”. The former is about generation gap and the latter is telling a story about a robbery. The students are in Grade 1, non-English, and each class has about 50 students. Before each class, the teacher is asked about his teaching plan, and after the class, he is interviewed about his feelings about the class. And there are some students as interviewees, they are sharing their feelings about the class, and expressing their hopes and advices and the observer will pass these information to the teacher. The students who receive the interview are divided into three kinds: the active ones, the middle-level ones and the passive ones.

The next part is the observation processes, and the comparison and conclusion are bases on this part, and the answers to the research questions can also be found in this part.

3 Class observation

3.1Main idea of unit 2 “Deep Concern”

This class is to talk about generation gap. The text has three roles, Sandy and her parents. Sandy likes all new and fashionable things, e.g. rock music, much make-up, tattoos… and she likes to have breakfast standing up and before brushing he0r teeth. However, her parents especially her father cannot bare these habits. There are many dialogues in this text, between Sandy and her father, Sandy and her mother, and between the father and the mother. Her parents want to find some solutions to solve these problems and to achieve better communication with their daughter.

3.2Class(1)――John, September 23

Before the class, John tells the observer his teaching plan, he will have a dictation first, and then explain the text as usual, adding many extra words.

The class begins. After simple greetings between the teacher and students, they have a dictation of 20 words in Unit 1.Then, John begins his explanation of the text directly, with no lead-in questions.

In the whole class, he is standing on the platform, using fluent, a little quick English to narrate the text. He puts all the dialogues into flat narration. During this, he adds extra words e.g. 0when they are reading the word “horrible”, he adds terrible, unpleasant, shocking, disgusting, frightening, awful……When there comes“appeal”, he tells the students to distinguish “appear” from it. When he talks about “negative”, he gives many words about attitude, such as positive, neutral, serious, indifferent, enthusiastic, impassive…

At the end of the class, he uses 5 minutes to give homework to the students written on PPT, so the students can be clear about what they are requested to do.

After the class, John is asked some questions by the interviewer: “What’s your feelings about the class?” “Why don’t you give them some pictures or organize some small activities?”“Do you think students like your class?” The followings are the main idea of John’s answers. He is a postgraduate who has just graduted for three months, it is his first time to be a teacher.Actually, he don’t know how to be a good teacher, or more concretely, he don’t know which kind of teaching methods can fit non-English students in this college. So he follows the style of his teachers in his postgraduate studies although he knows it is not suitable. This kind of narration without any activities cannot satisfy the active students.

Some students in this class are also interviewed by the observer. Most of them think John’s class is boring and difficult, they can hardly follow him, and many words that he adds are difficult for them to understand. What they like is interest in English, but in John’s class, there’s no joy. They hope John can lower the level of his spoken English, such as speaking relatively slow and simple English, giving some small performances, using more attractive tones to give lectures, covering all the students with different levels……

3.3Class(2)――David, September 24

In the same class, David and his students give each other hot greetings, and talk about something about their recent lives. Then, the students have a dictation of 20 words and 5 phrases in unit 1 as being told in his plan before the class. After the dictation, he asks some students to write the words and phrases on the blackboard, and then let the rest of the students check them. With that, three students give a role-play which David told them to prepare in the last class. In this small performance, “Sandy” is very modern and fashionable, while “the parents” cannot bare some of her habits, especially her “father”. What makes a very deep expression to everyone is the choice of the actors. They choose a boy with heavy make-up to play the role of Sandy, and a very thin girl to act the serious father. Everyone are enjoying the performance and the class is extremely active after this.

Then, David begins his explanation to the text. He uses fluent, but more vivid English and many gestures to help his description. There are also many lovely pictures in his ppt and he uses tapes to teach prononciations. What is the newest and most important is, he likes to let students ask him questions, about words, sentences or paragraphs, and then he asks these questions.

After class, the observer also interviews the teacher and some students. David says he feels OK about his class, but the knowledge he teaches to the students is not enough. He has the problem of keeping the balance between active and informative. The students also mention this problem. They feel David’s class is very interesting, but they cannot learn much things such as foreign cultures, additional words and phrases, reading and writing skills…

3.4Main idea of unit 7 “Face to Face with Guns”

This text is describing writer’s experience of being robbed by two robbers. The writer’s money, wallet, watch and even his KFC box. Then, the writer reports this to the police, and he is asked to look through mug shots. To his surprise, a number of them are actually children. So here comes the question that needs everyone to think about: do they rob because of hunger?

3.5Class(3)――John, November 18

Seeing from this class, John changes a lot. Before the class, he tells the observer his teaching plan. Except for the necessary dictation and explanation to the text, he adds some lead-in questions, a role-play and some culture introduction.

At the beginning, the students have a dictation of 20 words and 5 phrases in unit 6, and then John also asks some students to write them on the blackboard. He learns this checking method from David. After the dictation, John asks some lead-in questions, such as: “Have you ever been robbed?” “What will you do when facing with guns?” And then, three students act the writer’s experience of a robbery. Their funny and vivid performances win a lot applause. After that, John begins his explanation to the text. Compared with his last class being observed, this time he uses relatively simple English to express himself, and his speaking speed is much slower than the last. What’s more, he uses the tape to train the students’ prononciation and pictures to add into his ppt, and he also introduce some information about culture, such as William Blakes and the Thames River. Finally, as usual, he writes the homework on ppt.

After the class, John is interviewed again. He says that the students’s reactions and advices about the last class that the observer passed on to him are very useful and helpful for his class. He has been working hard to make his class not only informative but also, more importantly, interesting and attractive. So he adds some questions and role-play that students are interested in, and he receives satisfactory results. Furthermore, he also uses simple English to express himself, so that almost everyone can follow him. Now he feels he can communicate with the students better and he will try his best to improve his class continually. In addition, the students being interviewed this time also feel somewhat satisfied with John’s class. They like it now and firmly believe John will do better and better in future.

3.6Class(4)――David, November 19

David is, to some degree, an excellent teacher. He is humorous, active, although he is much older than John. In this class, there are not only pictures, examples, gestures, role-play as in the last class, but also other new things. When asking lead-in questions: “Have you ever been robbed?” He let the students answer it one by one. But when asking “What will you do if facing with guns?” He organizes a group discussion, and the students discuss it in 8 groups, then each group has a representative to answer the questions. In this class, he also plays a short film clip about a funny robbery. When explaining the text, he adds some culture introduction, e.g. KFC, William Blake, the Thames River. This time, he adds many important words and sentence structures. At last, he also uses 5 minutes to give the homework, written on ppt.

After class, David is interviewed by the observer. He says that he feels satisfied with current classes, and he will make some effort to improve it. His students also show satisfaction on David’s class, and they say they are very lucky to be David’s students.

4 A comparison of the four classes of the two teachers

5 Conclusion

Through comparing the totally four classes of the two teachers, it can be easily found that they are both trying hard to improve their classes. From boring to interesting, from barren to informative, from flat to vivid, the students like their classes more and more, though they can surely do better in the future. The important teaching methods, such as communicative language teaching, task-based teaching and learning and content-based instruction are used in the classes, in some degree though. Anyway, to match the students’ level and meet the students’ need are the two essential and important way to be a good and welcome teacher.

References:

[1]Yu Weihua. Teaching English in China’s Higher Education System: A Content-based Immersion Approach[M]. Guangzhou: New Century Press, 2003

[2]Wu Xudong. Second Language Acquisition: Methods and Practice[M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2006

[3]Zheng Shutang. New Horizon College English―Reading and Writing[M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2008

作者简介：孙洁，女，广州市广州大学华软软件学院外语系助教，本科学士学位，硕士在读，主攻外国语言学及应用语言学方向。