差异教学在初中英语教学中的运用

论文总字数：38754字

摘 要

初中生在智力、个性和性别方面的差异给教师的教学带来许多困难，并很容易产生两级分化。在新的英语教学课程标准中，教师会不可避免地面对学生的个体差异。差异教学的目的不是去消除学生的差异，取而代之的是承认学生的个体差异。只有教师考虑学生的个体差异，采用互动教学、分层教学和多样性评估，促进学生个体差异的发展，才能有效提高英语教学质量。

关键词：个体差异；差异教学；初中英语教学；应用

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 Definition of Differentiated Instruction 1

2.2 Features of Differentiated Instruction 2

2.3 Studies Abroad and Home 2

3. The Effectiveness of Differentiated Instruction in English Teaching 3

3.1 Improving Students’ Performance 3

3.2 Stimulating Students’ Interest in Learning 5

3.3 Improving the Efficiency of Learning 6

4. The Application of Differentiated Instruction in Junior English Teaching 7

4.1 Adapting Interactive Teaching 7

4.2 Developing Stratification Teaching 9

4.3 Using Diversified Evaluation 11

5. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 14

1. Introduction

Differentiated instruction is a new educational approach under the background of English curriculum reform. The special needs of the various stages in the development of students are taken into consideration in the differentiated instruction, according to students’ individual intelligence, personality and psychological difference, and it can increase students’ personal abilities and skills about family, community and society. It can effectively promote students’ all-round development(Wang Shiqing, 2005:51). This educational approach can help teachers to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each student. The organic combination of differentiated instruction and traditional teaching method can effectively improve teaching effectiveness and can also help students master the knowledge.

The requirement of differentiated instruction is that teachers should pay attention to the students’ common development and at the same time, should also focus on and notice students’ personal difference. It takes the students’ character and individuality into the organic unity and promotes the maximized development of teaching and learners. Differentiated instruction focuses on common development of students who have different academic levels and different learning abilities and also on the development of students’ different intellectual abilities. It can help to solve the problems of English teaching in junior high school.

The thesis is made up of five chapters. The application of differentiated instruction in junior English teaching is mainly discussed in the thesis. Chapter one puts forward the background and significance of this study. Chapter two is the literature review which reviews the previous studies both domestic and abroad. Chapter three analyzes the effectiveness of differentiated instruction in junior English teaching. Chapter four is an important chapter which discusses the application of differentiated instruction in junior English teaching. Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis, which summarizes the limitation of the thesis and points out some problems existing in the thesis.

2. Literature Review

2. 1 Definition of Differentiated Instruction

American Diane Heacox ever discussed the implementation of differentiated instruction means teachers change the speed of teaching, level, or types to meet the needs of learners, learning style or interest(Cohen, 2001:30). That’s to say, the differentiated instruction is the teachers design a diverse and challenging learning tasks according to the students’ learning needs and encourage students to become successful learners. The theoretical basis of the differentiated instruction is Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objective and Gardiner’s multiple intelligence(Li Pei, 2013:85). Differentiated instruction is carried out to understand the students first, followed by the design of a diverse, challenging teaching activities, and then to implement teaching using flexible teaching grouping form, and finally to pay attention to the assessment of teaching effectiveness. Differentiated instruction requires teachers to design a challenging task of learning to inspire the students’ autonomous learning and teachers should be aware of the existence of individual differences between students and develop teaching objectives according to the student’s special ability. Differentiated instruction focuses on the basic knowledge and the skills of learning. Differentiated instruction doesn’t require you to deepen the teaching content with great pains, but require you to challenge students’ thinking, so that they can learn a certain depth and breadth of knowledge actively and autonomously.

2. 2 Features of Differentiated Instruction

Firstly, the typical feature of successful differentiated instruction is that teachers proactively design a variety of learning content to adapt the wide learning differences.Teachers pay attention to the teaching actively. In the class which differentiated instruction is used in, teachers design diversified learning activities according to the students’ learning needs, arrange a variety of learning achievements and choose according to different learning needs. Many teachers mistakenly think the differentiated instruction is that the amount of learning tasks is different for each student. Differentiated instruction provides learning content, process and outcome of multiple choices. Secondly, differentiated instruction is a student-centered approach. In the class which differentiated instruction is used in, teachers pay attention to training students’ thinking ability and decision-making ability, only when the classroom learning and experience which students have had closely linked and when students’ learning initiative and interest are inspired, can we get the best effectiveness of learning. It’s the combination of the class, group and individual teaching.

2. 3 Studies Abroad and Home

In the west, Socrates’ spiritual midwifery can be regarded as the earliest practice of differentiated instruction because it pays attention to the students’ individual difference. In modern times, American educator Dewey put forward education center on the experience and activities of children, the idea of differentiated instruction was reflected most vividly. In the 1860s, Rogers proposed education centered on students, and he thought that teaching was promoting, it could facilitate students to discover and develop themselves, rather than set with the framework(Cao Rongping, 2003:43). It also reflected the idea of differentiated instruction. American scholar Carol Ann Tomlinson put forward, in his book “How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms”, the core idea of the differentiated instruction is viewing students’ individual as constituent elements of teaching and teaching ultimately promotes all students get due development at the same level.

In China, the source reflecting the differentiated instruction is Confucius “teach students in accordance of their aptitude”. It also reflects teaching must focus on students’ individual difference, and teaching should adjust according to different students’ different ability to accept from time to time(Zhang Fusheng, 2004:35).

Asynchronous teaching of Hubei University Professor Li Shifa had reflected the idea of differentiated instruction. His practice is to reach stratification improved by the correct adjustment layers of students stratification, goals stratification, hierarchical teaching, evaluation stratification, and thus carry out stratified teaching.

Chinese scholar Hua Guodong(2001:25) has done research focusing on how to take care of students’ difference for many years. He puts forward the theory and ideas of differentiated instruction, and thinks that the difference teaching refers to the difference in the class collective teaching bases on the student’s personality, in order to satisfy the requirement of students’ personal learning, promote each student to obtain the full development of the teaching on the basis of the original. The starting point of difference teaching is the existence of individual differences of students. The differences include the difference between individuals and within individuals, reflected in the students’ personality, interests, abilities and cognitive style.

3. The Effectiveness of Differentiated Instruction in English Teaching

3. 1 Improving Students’ Performance

Because there are individual genetic differences between male and female, the standards of social norms and behavior which the society puts forward to different sexes are also different. The individuals transform the external social standards into their own code of conduct in accordance with their own gender. So they get the psychological characteristics and behavior patterns to adapt with the gender. Boundaries and differences in these gender roles have an impact on a variety of social activities, which are also reflected in the students’ English learning activities. The influence of gender differences on English learning of junior high school students is the objective existence. Gender differences will lead to the difference of interest, confidence, styles and personalities in learning. Therefore, teachers should respect gender differences in the teaching process, only in this way can we better promote the junior middle school English teaching. Boys and girls are different in intelligence and personality, teachers should learn more about students, and give respect to male and female students’ psychological differences, and make an objective analysis of boys and girls in their respective characteristics from the perspective of psychological difference, and give full play to girls’ advantages. For example, in the aspect of vocabulary teaching, teachers can take some game activities, such as, words guessing, words solitaire and so on. Because the girls’ memory is relatively high in the action or the image memory, and under vivid circumstances memories of words and vocabularies will be more profound. It can improve their English ability and is conducive to better cultivate girls’ interest in learning English. In the daily teaching, the teachers should design some group activities and select the boys served as the group leader. This is an encouragement to boys. As a leader, the boy enhances his interest in learning English and increases his self-confidence and cultivates interest in learning English through organizing team members to collect material, the integration of material, and to report material which are his main task. If they have self-confidence and interest in learning, academic performance of boys can be quickly improved. Secondly, Teachers can take some measures to give full play to the advantages of the girls to learn English. For example, girls’ memory is better than boys, teachers should design more activities which can be reasonable to strengthen memory and strengthen the girls’ memory of vocabularies and words. At the same time, let girls check the boys on the words of memory. Boys can be faster to remember the words and phrases under the girls’ supervision. Girls are weaker in reading than boys, so teachers should usually ask more questions which should be understood when explaining the text and then let students discuss in groups so that students can learn from each other and in-depth thinking and analysis problems from multiple points of view. Last but not least, teachers should pay attention to boys’ mentality and adopt various methods to cultivate boys’ interest in learning. Teachers should often change the teaching content, teaching methods used, and the organization of the classroom, must make the classroom lively and interesting.

3. 2 Stimulating Students’ Interest in Learning

Respecting students who have different personalities can make students love English and learn English well. In the classroom teaching activities, teachers should pay attention to put students who have different personalities together. For example, group discussion, role playing and so on. This can enhance outgoing students’ accuracy of language using and introverts’ language fluency. Outgoing people tend to take external psychological activities, and they are confident, cheerful, lively and good at communicating. They are not afraid of making mistakes, and have courage to explore, and participate in classroom actively and their language expression is fluent. On the contrary, Introverts tend to internal mental activities. They are not good at expressing their own ideas and communicating. Teachers should change the teaching strategy according to the specific personality tendency. Outgoing students have good individual performance, and often can heighten the atmosphere of the classroom teaching and attract other students’ interest in English learning and attention, make the classroom full of vigor and vitality, and make the classroom full of charm. It’s not enough for them that let them only understand the core of language and have fluent oral English because they are easily affected by the outside world and their system knowledge is not solid. So they should strengthen professional knowledge and lay a solid foundation of basic skills. Introverted students are scanty of words and easily overlooked in the classroom. They are not willing to participate in the interaction between teachers and students, and don’t dare to express themselves, and they never take the initiative to raise their hands to answer questions. In view of this kind of introverted students and their characteristics, teachers should create a kind of harmonious classroom atmosphere with encouragement, support and cooperation, so that they dare to take risks and try to provide introverts with the opportunity to display their own. The teacher should give them more encouragement and less criticism, and help them to build up confidence and enthusiasm to enhance the courage to overcome difficulties and gradually overcome the weakness of character. If they have progress, teachers should give them praise kindly. In a word, the teachers should consciously take some activities, so that the different personality types of students can make some change in order to adapt to different learning environments and tasks.

As educators, we should first admit this difference. The English teachers’ teaching attitude shouldn’t be different because of the difference and can not discriminate against students who have different personalities and psychological obstacles. Teachers should try to make no exception, respect and understand them with the same enthusiasm. Because the students’ right to receive education is the same. In the process of classroom teaching, we must pay attention to students’ personality differences to improve the students’ interest in learning, and to stimulate the enthusiasm of students. Because the degree and effect of introverted and extroverted students accept language knowledge are not the same. If the students who have obstacles in learning have interest in learning English, they will motivate to learn.

3. 3 Improving the Efficiency of Learning

In the class, there are dozens of people and they can’t all be the same people and are different individual. The new curriculum puts ‘teachers should make students achieve a full and personalized development’ in a prominent position, emphasize the importance of individual differences and requires us to admit that students are the potential, developed and different people(Li Pei, 2013:85). In the process of teaching, teachers must pay attention to students’ individual difference, make a concrete analysis of concrete problems, in order to effectively improve the efficiency of classroom teaching. According to the learning situation of students, they will be divided into outstanding students, secondary student and students with learning difficulties. Teachers will design different learning tasks and give them different requirements of learning in order to improve their learning efficiency. For outstanding students, they should give full play to their strengths to solve some more difficult problems in the class so that the latter two can be inspired. At the same time, teachers should give them some freedom under the premise of ensuring to learn the contents of this section well and allow them to give full play to their initiative to learn by themselves. For secondary students, teachers should always put question, constantly remind them to listen and think seriously and organize more teaching in the class, and mainly let them solve moderate difficult problems, and timely give them outstanding students’ problems in order to make them gradually close to the outstanding students. For students with learning difficulties, because their foundation is not good, the goals which teachers give them should not too high. For example, they had better be required to master new words and vocabularies in this lesson and be able to read the text and write neatly and so on. They can meet these simple requirements by putting a little hard work. In this case, they don’t only feel there is hope but also taste the joy of success. Students find confidence in learning and their interest in learning will be greatly improved. After long-term effect, the results will naturally be gradually improved, and they will naturally transform to secondary students, even to outstanding students. Of course, in practice, we must pay attention to the following problems:teachers must fully understand the learning situation of students, and carefully study according to the situation and give students different grades. When assigning learning tasks to students, teachers should pay attention to avoiding hurting the self-esteem of students, especially the students with learning difficulties, and reasonably assign tasks to students. Teachers should carefully design the teaching in the class and three types of learning tasks according to teaching content and situation of different students to ensure the three types of students can do their best in class. The teachers must treat these three types of students equally and cannot discriminate against students with learning difficulties. Teachers should use heart of love to warm them and let them feel love. Through the above method, according to the students’ individual differences in the learning process, concrete problems need concrete analysis, teachers should explore more suitable teaching methods to suit the students, and it can help to improve the teaching efficiency of class teaching, and can also promote the learning ability of students. We should deal with the influence which the individual difference of students bring with the dialectical view. As a teacher, you should be active to convert the complexity of difference to effective starting point of teaching. This kind of differentiated instruction method will bring a beautiful blue sky to the junior English teaching.

4. The Application of Differentiated Instruction in Junior English Teaching

4. 1 Adapting Interactive Teaching

In junior high school English teaching, in order to take the students who have different knowledge level, personality and learning style into consideration, in order to achieve the exchange of information of different levels, in order to ensure that students can successfully answer, teachers can carry out interactive teaching according to the actual differences of students. Adapting interactive teaching in the class enables students to better understand the knowledge learned in the lesson, and also to better consolidate knowledge. In the traditional model, the teachers will only transfer knowledge by the expression of language, and the majority of students cannot understand the content of teachers’ explanation. They will not ba able to keep up teachers’ teaching ideas resulting in low self-esteem of mind.

Here I will use specific examples of teaching to elaborate the application of interactive teaching in the class:

There are about twelve to fourteen units in the English book of seventh grade or eighth grade. Each unit we can use four to six class hours to complete. In the study, teachers should adapt interactive teaching mode and conduct classroom teaching.

4. 1. 1 The Guidance of Teachers

The teacher properly guide the students bofore teaching the new courses, and firstly introduce the related background knowledge and put forward the teaching requirements in order to lay a good foundation for students to understand. The teacher mainly guide students, clear obstacles of learning new knowledge and provide rich material for the new lesson. For example, before explaining the unit 10, teachers should firstly compare chinese and foreign cultural difference. When Chinese have a small talk, they can talk about age, height, salary and other personal questions. But, in English culture, it’s not very polite to ask such personal questions. In the chat, most people like talking about the weather to start a conversation, and the easy topic will make people feel happy. In this way, students will go into good preparation, and their interest in learning will also be stimulated, so as to produce a kind of desire to seek knowledge.

4. 1. 2 Students Learn by Themselves

At the beginning of the new teaching, teachers should formulate feasible teaching goals which students can easily achieve according to the characteristics of students’ psychology and physiology, and then put forward the course learning objectives to students. Students learning by themselves after making clear self-study methods and requirements. Let them find the problem, research the problem, seek knowledge, and prepare for the group discussion. Students should be required to do full preview of new words. They can get a lot of knowledge by looking up the dictionary and listening to the tape. Because students try their best to get the knowledge by themselves, the impression will be profound and It also can lay the foundation for the group to discuss the next day.

4. 1. 3 Group Discussion

Group discussion is conductd based on the students’ self-study and preliminary perception. Generally speaking, one group consists of four students with different levels( one outstanding student, two secondary students, one student with learning difficulties). Every once in a while, the group need be composed again. In the class, every group should report their situation of self-study and it’s generally controlled in about 15 minutes. The members of each group report their situation of preview in English. Group members take turns to ask questions about this lesson’s goals of learning and self-study. The group leader summarizes the various problems encountered by group members to think and discuss together. Finally, the group leader sum up the problems which group members cannot solve in order to solve these problems when all groups discuss together. In this process, teachers should give full play to the leading role. When students are in trouble, teachers should not easily give their answers but try to guide them and let them make correct or almost correct answer. Students achieve the goal of learning by self-study and helping together in group members.

4. 1. 4 Communication among All Groups

After group discussion, students should communicate among all groups, that is to say, the whole classmates communicate and discuss together. Teachers should let the well-prepared group report their understanding of knowledge at first, and then the other groups make a supplementary, query and evaluate. And each group put forward their problems, these problems will be discussed among all groups. After a fierce discussion on the content of the text, the students have a more profound understanding of the text. In the course of the discussion, the teacher must be good regulation, let the students’ discussion always focus on the text and topic and highlight the key issues. At last, under the teachers’ guidance, students and students summarize what they learn and form a consensus. In this way, all student can exchange their views boldly in the class, and can take the initiative to acquire knowledge. Their ability of self-study and analysis and many kinds of thinking abilities are also improved. And unknowingly, students also improve language skills, learning potential and creativity. It’s more important to cultivate students the spirit of unity and cooperation.

4. 2 Developing Stratification Teaching

The famous psychologist Lev Vygotsky put forward “Zone of Promimal Development”. The difference that between the level of chidren under the guidence and by means of adults’ help solve problrms and the level of they solve problrms in independent activities is called “Zone of Promimal Development”by Vygotsky(Arnold, 2000:45). It is important for the process of education to focus on the developing process which children are still in the formation of the state rather than the developed process which children have completed. This theory gives us an important enlightenment on the teaching of English. The stratification in the stratification teaching actually is in order to ensure that teaching and “Zone of Promimal Development”are adaptable, and that can promote the students’ efficient learning. In junior high school English teaching, teachers can use stratification teaching to meet the needs of students in different levels and fully mobilize the enthusiasm of the students to solve the individual difference existing in the students.

English teaching activities can be divided into three sectors:review the old knowledge, learn new knowledge and consolidate and practice the new knowledge. When developing differentiated instruction of English, teachers should make a reasonable division of the students according to the differences of the students’ English level and learning ability, and ensure that every student can learn knowledge under the circumstances of taking account of the teaching efficiency. Of course, the stratification does not devide students themselves into various grades and ranks but adopt a taeching method in order to let the students learn better. Students in different stratification have different requirements after developing stratification. For example, teachers can devide students according the students’ knowledge structure, basic knowledge and comprehensive English ability. Students in A level have good English grades and the ability to read, write, listen and speak English. The grades and ability of English of students in B level are common. The grades and ability of English of students in C level are not very good. For students in A level, teachers can improve their level of English by making them repeat English dialogue and train grammar knowledge and so on. For students in B level, teachers can improve their level of English by making them review the content of communication and grammar points. For students in C level, teachers can improve their level of English by dictation and so on. In order to reflect the differentiated instruction in the class exercises, teachers can carry out language practice activities to further promote students to learn new knowledge focusing on different strtifications of students after teachers finish the explanation of new knowledge. When teaching new knowledge, teachers should pay attention to students’ comprehensive performance and devide them into three groups according to their performance, and devide targets into primary target, secondary target and advanced target according to the requirements of the teaching objectives. Groups of students communicate with each other according to the change of learning situation. For example, in the unit How Do You Make a Banana Milk Shake? There is a section of the unit:How do you make fruit salad?In the process of teaching, we can set the following targets, primary target:master the words‘peel, finally, yogurt’ and read a book to retell the method of making fruit salad. Secondary target:master the words ‘peel, finally, yogurt’and retell the method of making fruit salad without read the book. Advanced target: master the words ‘peel, finally, yogurt, teaspoon, mixup’and use the content of lesson to write their own production process about “How to make…”. Before class, teachers need to inform students of these targets, and let the students make clear the task and then use stratification teaching method so that student can experience the joy of success. Let students feel the joy of struggle and success by the implementation of achievement strategies. When designing the task of teaching, teachers must take into account the practical ability of the students. Let the student complete the task through their efforts. In this way, it can make the students experience the joy of success and be able to stimulate students’ learning enthusiasm. So teachers can give students the same material, but give them different requirements and let students complete the work through their efforts. In the process of learning, the teacher should give specific guidance to enhance their learning interest and enthusiasm for learning. For example, in the process of teaching ‘Let’s learn’, teachers can design a fishing game and write the words which students have learned on the fish shaped card with a magnet. After catching the fish, students need to read the words on the card. When placing these fish cards, teachers teachers can consciously arrange so that the students whose comprehensive levels are low can catch simple fish. When they read the words, they will have a sense of achievement, and it can provide the impetus for the follow-up study. In differentiating instruction of junior English, students homework is an important part. The traditional homework’s subject, requirements and answers are unified. This assignment of homework apparently ignore the richness of the teaching content and the differences of students’ learning ability. As a result, too easy homework is unfavourable for the learning effect of students who have good learning ability. If the homework is too difficult, students who have poor learning ability will have no idea to solve problems. In the process of teaching, teachers should design various and different levels questions for students to choose according to the students individual differences. Teachers should design different practices according to the actual situation of different students and let students apply what they have learnt in use. For example, the content of the homework ‘Write a letter to your friend’, so the design of homework should have three levels:‘letter’ without limiting the content, ‘letter’given keywords and ‘letter’existing structure and need to fill sentences, and ask the students to try their best to finish the homework. If homeworks are designed like this, even students with low learning ability can also fill out the correct sentence and may also try to finish the more advanced homework and test whether their learning level is improved in the process of finishing the homework.

4. 3 Using Diversified Evaluation

Teachers understand the difference in English learning of students and adopt diversified evaluation mode to do an objective analysis of students’ ability and the process of learning English. It’s more conducive to improve students’ comprehensive ability of learning English. According to the different needs of students’ learning and development, teachers take the optimization of the teaching process and methods as a breakthrough point and use diversified evaluation. It can make students’ thinking more rich. Firstly, teachers should have passion in the process of evaluating students, and encourage students to always maintain a full positive learning emotions to take part in studying. It can enhance learning motivation. Secondly, teachers take many aspects into consideration including students’ language learning skills, the effect of expression, sense of language and so on, and help students to improve the students’ learning skills. At last, teachers evaluate the situation of students’ flexible use of comprehensive thinking and improve the students’ comprehensive ability of using the language by enriching the teaching methods. In the process of evaluation, teachers should deal with students’ errors and problems with a tolerant attitude and make the students feel the teachers’ care and help. At first, teachers should develop hierarchical incentive, and commend the development and innovation of good students and activate their initiative. The poor students should be given full praise in view of their learning progress, while the introverted students should be encouraged and guided. Secondly, teachers ought to give students help and encouragement, and let the students take appropriate remedial measures according to their own gains and losses of learning. It should reflect humanism. Finally, students should be given a good learning atmosphere. Teachers should encourage students to have positive and active spirit of learning and provide students with more platform of English talent show. The traditional teaching evaluation is a kind of passive single mode of teachers’ evaluation to students. In the new curriculum of the teaching of English, teachers can use multiple methods to evaluate students. Teachers can give full play to comprehensive evaluation of parents, peers, groups and so on. Teachers should get students to truly understand their own learning situation. Through the way of use, teachers can not only make the course of interaction possible but also can objectively evaluate the comprehensive learning situation of students. In the evaluation, teachers can adopt the students’ self evaluation in order to understand the students’ thinking process, and can adopt evaluation of peers in order to listen to reasonable suggestions, and can adopt evaluation in groups in order to promote the students’ development by learning from each other, and also adopt evaluation of parents in order to understand the students’ learning behavior. The teachers can form the comprehensive evaluation suggestions on the basis of all aspects of views. Adopting these diversified evaluation modes, on the one hand, is more conducive to the students to adjust their learning strategies and improve the overall ability of utilization, on the other hand it can arouse students’ initiative and enthusiasm in learning English, and activate their thinking development of innovation.

5. Conclusion

In this thesis, there are many shortcomings. Because the limit of the time, manpower, material resources and other objective conditions, the thesis is lack of the combination of theory and practice and has no enough practical investigation. Several differentiated instruction strategies proposed in the thesis can’t adapt to all junior English teaching because my theoretical knowledge and the ability of study are limited. In the thesis, we see the practical value of this thesis through the analysis of students’ individual difference, interactive teaching, stratification teaching and diversified evaluation. The idea and method of differentiated instruction mentioned in the thesis make teachers’ teaching focus on all the students and take into account the needs of different students. Using a variety of teaching methods with the least amount of time and energy can achieve the best possible results and improve the teaching efficiency.

Works Cited

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