论文总字数：31760字

摘 要

和谐的氛围是唤醒学生生命活力的基础也是培养创造性人才的沃土。本文基于人本主义理论，分析了和谐语言课堂与英语学习的关系。本文认为和谐的英语课堂有助于提高课堂教学效率，培养学生创造性思维。在构建和谐英语课堂过程中，教师应坚持以学生为中心，建立平等的师生关系，教学方法灵活等原则。同时在教学过程中，教师要运用好教学策略，包括关注学生的情感、建立和谐师生关系以及运用情景教学法和情感教学法, 以便促进学生的语言学习，提高英语课堂教学效果。

关键词：人本主义；和谐课堂；教学策略

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. Humanism in Language Education 2

3.1 The Theory of Humanism 2

3.2 Student -centered Teaching 3

3.3 Humanity in English Classroom 4

4. Impact of Harmonious Classroom on Language Learning 4

4.1 Harmonious Language Learning Classroom 4

4.2 Making Students More Active 5

4.3 Developing Students’ Creativity 6

5. Principles of Creating Harmonious Language Classroom 6

5.1 Sustainable Development 6

5.2 Equal conversation 7

5.3 Student-Centeredness 7

5.4 Diversity of Teaching Methods 8

6. Strageties for Creating Harmonious Language Classroom 9

6.1 Establishing a Harmonious Relationship between Teachers and Students. 9

6.2 Employing Situational Approaches 10

6.3 Using Affective Methods 11

7. Conclusion 11

Works Cited 12

1. Introduction

As the organic and important cornerstone of social development, education must adapt to the development. During recent years, the concept of harmonious society has been discussed heatedly, so the harmony of education has also raised many scholars’ attention. Under this background, many education experts put forward the concept of harmonious language classroom. In the practical English teaching, it still has a lot to be desired. As for the teaching content, degree of the secondary development and use of teaching materials is not enough. Many teachers tend to pass on English knowledge instead of paying attention to the dominant position of students. The time that teachers give to the students in language practice is limited due to a chain of reasons and limitation. Some classrooms are even the halls of the phrase. Sometimes we overemphasize the teacher’s dignity, but if we want to build a harmonious English classroom, the teacher must try to desalinate their authority and to show their respect for the students with full sincerity. In addition, the teachers’ plan about the textbook is often not well-organized. Some serious problems are obvious. For example, the teachers hold superstition about the teaching materials, they just repeat what the books say. It can be seen in a common phenomenon in classroom that the need of students is often neglected, when a student gives a wrong answer, some teachers may criticize the student. The activity of students in language classroom is constrained.

From the aspect of theories, the construction of harmonious English classroom stems from the concept of harmonious education and theory of humanism. The study about harmonious English classroom also enriches relevant English teaching theories. This paper stands on the theory of humanism and talked about the relationship between language classroom and English language learning. The ultimate goal of this research is to improve students’ overall comprehension of English language and to promote students’ integrated skills of identification, appreciation and cultural cognition. It can be said that this paper in some way is valuable.

2. Literature Review

Harmonious classroom is an ideal classroom in which the relationship between students and teachers is comfortable, the process of teaching is fluent and the teaching result is effective. A harmonious English classroom includes the harmony of relationship between teachers and students, the harmony of teaching methods and students’ cognitive level, the harmony of individual character and all-round development, the harmony of students’ subject position and teachers’ leading position. Some researchers thought the harmonious language classroom is the main approach to create harmonious education and develop harmonious people. Basing on this idea, the researcher put forward three requirements for teachers. Firstly, teachers should strive to create a harmonious classroom atmosphere in which all the elements of English subject grow together and promote each other. Secondly, teachers ought to encourage students more instead of criticizing. This requires teachers to motivate students’ inspiration and creative thinking, at the same time, to encourage students to discover and explore new problems. Thirdly, freedom is more important than creativity.

What’s more, there are some researchers studied the construction of harmonious classroom based on the theory of happy teaching. The researcher holds the point that the happy teaching is a teaching method which can fully arouse the initiative of teachers and students. Then the teacher is willing to teach and the students are willing to learn. The teaching activities are expanded in a harmonious and lively atmosphere. The students can fully feel the happiness of achieving success after overcoming obstacles. At the same time, the researcher also put forward some specific approaches of constructing harmonious English classroom. (Zhang Chun, 2006)

3. Humanism in Language Education

From the perspective of classroom teaching element, the disharmony in English classroom mainly show in the teaching content, teaching methods, teaching process, teaching aims and teaching environment. This paper sums up and arranges the disharmonious phenomenon in English classroom from the five aspects.

3.1 The Theory of Humanism

The theory of humanism appears in the end of 1950s, due to its’ difference from recent two traditional psychology schools, (psychoanalytical theories of Freud and psychology of behaviorism), the theory of humanism is regarded as the third force of psychology. The representative figures of humanism include Maslow and Rogers.

The core of humanism requires the teachers to pay attention to the dignity and subjectivity of human beings. So the theory of humanism demands that the teachers respect the learners and regard the learners as the subject of study. In addition, the teachers must believe that every learner can educate himself and develop his own talent. It needs a good relationship between students and teachers in order to form a harmonious study context. About the teaching content, the humanism stressed the direct experience of students, the students can freely choose what to learn and how to learn. This reminds the teachers to give more freedom to students in classroom teaching. During the teaching process, traditional English classroom just required the teachers to teach well.

As a matter of fact, to improve teaching, the teachers not only study how to teach well but also study how to let students learn well. The teaching process is a process of students to release inner power in a safe mental atmosphere, and free development is the best condition to achieve inborn power. The teaching task is to help a harmonious atmosphere useful to students’ learning. In the teaching methods, the student centered idea demands the teachers to let students choose and find freely about learning content. About the teaching assessment, humanism stresses self assessment, while traditional assessment asserts that the learners’ assessment is practiced by other people. And the humanism thinks that only when the learners asset themselves can they achieve their study aims.

3.2 Student -centered Teaching

To improve students’ interest in English learning, the teachers should strive to make the classroom interesting and lovely. Making student main role in classroom is our responsibility. That means the teachers must do what they can to meet the demands of students. A harmonious English classroom should put students at the central position. In Chinese education, “teacher-centered” idea is a long history just different from that western education. In our history, teaching just means the adults force children to yield to stick hand social norms, if the student against, serious punishment will come out. After some years of reform and opening up, china has undergone profound changes. The problems of teaching have aroused more attention and discussion. Currently, the biggest problem in education is to establish a student-centered philosophy of education. Students will lack of initiative, enthusiasm, self-awareness and sense of responsibility without the "student center" theory. The teachers should think about “who is the subject of study”. In summary, from the "adult-centered" to "child-centered" and from the "teacher-centered" to "student-centered" are the basic trends of the development of contemporary education. To build a harmonious English classroom, the student-centered philosophy is needed.

3.3 Humanity in English Classroom

We use ‘humane’ in everyday contexts to mean ‘disposed to treat human beings and animals with consideration and compassion. The Oxford English Dictionary uses the phrase“humanize or refine”as though these two words are near-synonyms. What does it mean“ to be more human ”or “to realize one’s potential”？ Moskowitz thought that there are two major emphases. The first one is feelings. Humanistic education takes it into consideration that learning is affected by how students feel about themselves. And it is related to the education of the whole person, the intellectual and the emotional dimensions are included. The language learners are regarded as whole persons with emotional and intellectual needs. As a result, in English classroom, the attention paid to students’ needs is necessary. Simply speaking, the process of teaching is not only a process of pouring out what the teacher knows but also the process of students’ to receive. It in some way puts forward some requirements for the construction of harmonious English classrooms. The second emphases of Moskowitz is to bring out the uniqueness of each individual, simply speaking, the teaching approaches ought to be designed to cater to the diversity of students. Within the field of education, humanism is often thought of putting emphasis on the integration of cognition and affect (treating students as whole persons).

4. Impact of Harmonious Classroom on Language Learning

4.1 Harmonious Language Learning Classroom

Our students live in a world filled with complex psychological, physical and emotional stresses. So sometimes some small things in classroom can distract them, and distance them from their physical and intellectual selves. In addition, the teachers also face these challenges. The teachers often struggle to cope with teaching loads and always try to achieve a balance between professional and personal lives. Having seen these problems in classroom, we must try to figure out how to build a harmonious classroom. A harmonious language learning classroom is one which is mentally, physically and emotionally healthy. In this environment, the tensions and stresses are lessened and the teachers and students can concentrate more, yet relaxed. In order to build a harmonious language learning classroom, the teachers should try to reduce the pressures and anxiety in classroom, and respect their students’ different language learning styles and emphasize a healthy intellectual and emotional attitude to one’s self and others. Besides, the attention to and care of intellect, the physical body and emotional life is very important. They can not be separated from each other. Only in this way, can the harmonious learning classroom be accomplished.

4.2 Making Students More Active

In traditional English classroom, the teacher makes most of the decisions for the students, for example, we tend to tell students which text book to use. We might sometimes forget that the students can take learning seriously. In harmonious English classroom, the relationship between teachers and students is equal, so the students are given more chances to make decisions about study. In addition, to take learning seriously, learners are also willing to be taken seriously by their teachers and to make more contribution to the language classroom. The harmony in classroom also comes from the teachers’ respect for individual difference. Although learners in our classroom have something in common, we all know that each lesson is a different lesson for every learner. If the teacher tries to be a guider instead of being a commander in harmonious English classroom, and at the same time, tries to learn more about different characteristics of students, the diversity is taken into consideration. Participation of every student in classroom is a key point of teaching. The teacher should design questions of different levels to let most students take part in classroom activity. As a result, learners will learn best in their own unique ways as individuals. Moreover, the harmony in English classroom also comes from the teachers’ teaching methods. As we know, students tend to take interest in subjects from which they gain a lot. Interest is the best teacher, but the interest comes from self-confidence. Some researches found that any student who has obtained achievement is willing to work hard in their following study. So in language teaching, the teacher should give praise to students’ progress in time, in order to develop and protect their sense of achievement. Not only in homework, but also after some tests, teachers ought to make a summary and give a feedback about students’ progress. In classroom, even someone gives an incorrect answer, teacher can let him think it over and then answer again. Then the frustration from answering incorrectly can decrease, instead, their self-confidence has been developed and promoted. Self-confidence is a key in everything learning, students who are confident must be active in classroom.

4.3 Developing Students’ Creativity

A good relationship between teachers and students can promote the formation of harmonious classroom, in other words, a harmonious classroom can improve their relationship. An equal, free and safe atmosphere is essential to motivate students’ creativity. A teacher in a harmonious English classroom is good at understanding students’ inner world. Modern education concept thinks that the essence of people is positive, the aim of education is to develop students’ potential and promote the overall development of people. However, the authoritative relationship may smother the students’ creativity and talent. When the teacher gets along well with the students, the classroom can become a lively one. Students become active and try to express their own idea about some knowledge. In traditional classroom, some students dare not raise their hands up because they are afraid of being criticized by the teacher if the students give an incorrect answer. In a harmonious classroom, the teachers learn more about students’ mentality and transmit their love to students in a respectful way. The students feel that they are the masters of study in teaching activities. A harmonious English classroom language teaching is a process including students’ active participation. the distance between teachers and students gets short. During the process of teaching, the efficiency is obviously increased.

5. Principles of Creating Harmonious Language Classroom

“Harmony” means a pleasing combination of elements in a whole. As for the language teaching, harmony means that various factors contributing to the teaching activities are well integrated under the educational concept of student-oriented. As a result, the students’ self-development, self-inspiration and self-fulfillment can be largely insured. Harmonious classroom building should bear the following principles.

5.1 Sustainable Development

The theory of humanism attaches importance to mental factors in language learning. From the perspective of personality cultivation, learning process is not only the process for students to acquire language knowledge skills and develop intelligence but also the process of learning students’ emotion, need and value. So the basic goal education is to raise learners’ learning motivation with the help of teachers. To stimulate students’ study motivation, the teacher should help students form the inner driving force and it is the first task to promote students’ sustainable development. Moreover, the intrinsic requirement of sustainable development is to teach students how to learn and learn through all their life. The construction of Harmonious classroom can help realize the mutual development between learning and teaching. On building harmonious language learning classroom, the methods designed should not only help students acquire knowledge and skills but also enrich their emotion and set up their new values. This can be simply said that the goal of teaching is not only the process of knowledge transmission but also the promotion of students’ long-term progress. As a result, through upgrading students’ quality of value and life, students and teachers can realize the promotion of all-round and sustainable development.

5.2 Equal conversation

To realize the construction of harmonious classroom further more, teachers should follow the principles of equal conversation and treat students as the subjects during teaching procedure. This principle in some way can be seen as the cooperative principle. In traditional language learning classroom, the teachers play the key role in the classroom and the authoritative position of teachers can not be shaken. The students are afraid to put forward their own thought. However, the new curriculum concept emphasizes the interaction, communication and mutual complement between students and teachers. The students and teachers freely share their own thinking, experience, emotion and knowledge in order to enrich the teaching content. In addition, the attitude from teachers and the relationship between them can provide students with a cheerful atmosphere in which the English language competence will be improved. The teaching isn’t the simple plus of teaching and learning any more, but the construction of cooperative sense. This means teachers and students are in a harmony of mentality. The equal conversation between teachers and students makes the subject role of students more obvious, the performance of characteristic more fully.

5.3 Student-Centeredness

As for a harmonious classroom, it should be student-centered. There is a debate about what is the education center during education theorists. Some people advocate the “teacher centered”, while some people advocate the “knowledge center”. However, the “student-centered” philosophy of education is recognized and accepted by more and more people as the basic trend of the contemporary education development and an important symbol. The harmonious classroom requires the teachers to set up the sense of severing students. As for student-centered, it doesn’t mean the duty of teachers is impaired in classroom. On the contrary, the duty of teachers gets strengthened. That means the teachers should guide students to seek information during learning process, compared with traditional “teacher centered”, the work of teachers becomes more challenging. “Student-centered” teaching principle also requires teachers to design education teaching objectives, to select the content of teaching and use flexible teaching methods so that the students can have full development. And this is based on the characteristics of physical and mental development of students and students’ knowledge, interest, ability level. This education takes the students as starting point, and the main body of their own development. Teachers take students’ demand into consideration and try to design teaching activities catering to students. As we know, students of different have different learning demand, students who do well in English need to do some more difficult exercises while those underachievers need easier exercises. This demands the teachers to assign homework and exercises more appropriately. Without these efforts of teachers the development of students’ initiative can’t be achieved. A harmonious classroom teaching needs the principle of “Student-centered”, “Student-centered” classroom teaching needs a harmonious atmosphere. It requires a democratic, equal and harmonious relationship between teachers and students. The encouraging, trusting and respectful attitude from teachers can help develop students’ potential and help students find out the most effective learning methods.

5.4 Diversity of Teaching Methods

In a harmonious English classroom, the teaching methods of teachers should be designed for students of different level. In all subjects, the weak students exist more or less. When the teacher is faced with the difference of students’ competence, some often pay more attention to the good students and neglect the weak ones. This in some way leads the weak students to get tired of the teacher, as well as the subject. As time goes by, the weak students even start to give up this subject. The harmonious English classroom must be balanced and is able to accept the diversity of individuals. As the diversity of living things is the term that they live and develop, diversity promotes to live. The diversity of teaching objects as well stands as the abundant resources to promote students’ development. The balanced classroom should respect and understand the variance of students and actively use the variance to focus on every student’s development. In this sense, teachers need a sense of “for all the students.” Every student’s interest, talent and learning methods are variant, which leads to the different performance on tests. The object of “overall development” will come to nothing if the teacher just focuses on the accomplishment of teaching task without thinking about the every student’s learning process and individual development. So the teacher ought to spend more time learning students and analyzing the content of textbook to design a variety of teaching activities. In the end, every student is able to take part in classroom activities and improve their English language competence.

Apart from the obvious difference of students, the sex-difference-oriented education has been taken into consideration. Some psychologists draw the conclusion that most girl students are excellent in language competence while boy students are better in math. As a matter of fact, in English classroom, the most of the absent-minded are the boy students, the girl students are relatively more active. To solve this problem, the English teacher should pay more attention to the boy students and give them more encouragement. If this problem is solved, the classroom will be more harmonious.

The knowledge-difference-oriented education means the teacher ought to teach according to the students’ level of cognition. B.S.Bloom thought that the difference of study comes from the difference of mastering knowledge skills when they begin to learn. It’s pointed that the core of study is the previous study experience, which requires the teacher take every student’s experience into consideration. As a result, the difference of study will decrease. Through classroom observation and questionnaires, the teacher will learn the state of students’ study, stable learning goals can be determined afterwards.

6. Strategies for Creating Harmonious Language Classroom

6.1 Establishing a Harmonious Relationship between Teachers and Students.

The teacher should transfer his leading role and set up equal relationship with students. Some psychologists found that if one teacher loves and holds expectation of her students, then she will give her students more praise and encouragement. As a return, the students will trust and respect the teacher and determine to work hard. In a harmonious language classroom, the teachers can try to be organizers instead of being mentors, to let the students feel equal in human dignity and eliminate mental obstacles. That is to say “kiss the teacher and believed in their own ways.” To build a new and equal relationship between teachers and students, the teachers play an important role. As a teacher, she must come to be the cooperator of students, instead of being a guider. When preparing lessons, the harmony of students’ mentality must be one of the important contents and pursuit. On this basis, the teacher can design the psychological import method. Only when the teacher begins to approach students can the students approach knowledge at last. Students can be our communicators not only the speakers or listeners. The teacher must bear it in mind that the objects of education are living people who are the subjects of recognition and development. The harmonious development of relationship between students and teachers can provide spiritual security for the construction of harmonious language classroom.

6.2 Employing Situational Approaches

The situational approaches mean the environment in which the students can learn more efficiently. It is a harmonious state in our English classroom. Situational approaches are one of the most effective methods of English learning. In this way, the students tend to be personally on the scene and can be more easily moved by what they see. When using this method in English classroom, the teacher will lead the students to perceive the language in order to grasp the true essence of language. Without more explanation from the teacher, the students will naturally try to use the target language in the particular context. How can the teacher make the method useful? This method demands the teacher to plan a series of situation according to the difficult points of the chapter. For example, before the class begins, the teacher can play a short English movie or some English songs, let the students have a environment of English language. What the teacher must pay attention to is that the designed situation should encourage the students to take part in classroom activities. Then the classroom comes to be a relaxing and enjoyable location, a harmonious classroom tends to appear. In this part we can take something as an example, when we are learning a unit about holiday, the teacher can organize a group discussion and then ask the students what they usually do during their holiday. It is obvious that every student has joined the discussion activity. Every child tends to be a member of the classroom. In traditional English classroom, the teachers just try to tell what they know to the students. As a result, the students usually have a smattering of knowledge due to the lack of situation where the language is applied.

6.3 Using Affective Methods

After the reformation of classification teaching, the teacher should adopt different teaching methods aimed at different English level of students, that is to say exercise with purpose. For the students of who has a weak English foundation, the encouragement and support from teachers seem to be particularly important. The encouragement can help these students eliminate fear about English learning. Through the survey of freshmen about their study interest, it can be seen that most of the students hold a fear about English and the confidence to learn English is insufficient. According to the result, how can they try to be active in English classroom, the interaction can hardly get on. In English classroom, the orientation of teachers is the key to build a good psychological atmosphere. Firstly, the teacher should tell the students that learning English is not that difficult as they thought. Everyone who is mentally sound can grasp this language through some exercise. The teacher can make comparison between English language and Chinese language to conclude that the English language has a less vocabulary than Chinese. We can learn our native language well, the English language will be easy to learn as well. Through this example, the confidence of students will be built. Apart from the fear of English subject, the gap of grade between students may cause students’ anxiety, what the teacher can do is not to evaluate students only based on grades.

7. Conclusion

In a word, harmony is not only a guiding concept of teaching and education, but also the ultimate goal of English classroom. To promote the construction of a harmonious language classroom, the teachers should constantly absorb advanced teaching concepts and improve teaching approaches. The initiative and cooperative competence of students should be put in an important place. This research analyzes the causes of disharmony in recent English teaching classroom from some aspects and puts forward some imperfect strategies and methods. The problems can’t be solved once and for all. Therefore, in order to build a harmonious language classroom and to improve students’ learning efficiency, there are many places worthy of further research.

Works Cited

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[4] 李丹心.《营造课堂和谐气氛促进英语教学效益》[J].课程教材教学研究，2007（5）

[5] 张淳.《论通过愉快教学构建和谐英语课堂》 ( J ). 武汉科技大学学报，2006（6）

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