小学英语教育论文 Primary School English Teaching in China – New Developments
Introduction to the background
Prior to 2017 English has not been a compulsory course in primary schools although some
teaching of English has taken place at this level since the mid 1980s. This has been on a
very modest scale although on an increasingly larger scale mostly in urban key schools in
over 27 provinces. It has been estimated that there were about 8 million primary school pupils studying English in 1998, and that number has been growing rapidly, with an increase of one million every year since 1994 (Liu and Gong 2017:36). Nevertheless, the teaching of English at this level had not been standardized, due to its unrecognized position in the school curriculum, limited availability of qualified teachers and lack of appropriate teaching materials. The starting age varied from age 8 to age 11 and the weekly time allocation ranged from 1 period to 4 periods depending on the availability of
the teachers. The approach to teaching was more often a mixture of the structural and functional, with situational dialogues being the main form of texts along with a strong emphasis on learning IPA to ensure correct pronunciation and intonation at the initial stage.
Most textbooks used for primary schools were produced locally including a few licensed foreign textbooks, such as ‘Look, Listen and Learn’, ‘English 300’, ‘ New Concept English’. Some schools simply used secondary school English textbooks for the primary lev el. The transition or continuity from the primary to the secondary has long been a problem but never seriously tackled as there has been very little research conducted on foreign language teaching at the primary level in China.
Since the start of the new millenium, the Chinese government has become increasingly concerned with the upgrading the level of English of all Chinese citizens. It was decided in early 2017 that English would be offered at primary level from September of that year,starting in cities and then gradually towns and villages (Ministry of Education Document,April 2017). The Basic Requirement for Primary School English was designed and issued at the same time by the Ministry of Education (MOE). The Basic Requirement makes it clear that the beginning age is grade 3 (age 8) and the time allocation recommended is 4 times a week, with a minimum of 80 minutes, based on the principle of shorter periods and higher frequency. The numbers of primary school pupils and teachers are difficult to estimate at present as the total number of primary school students reaches 130 million and it is just the beginning of this large scale development of English language teaching.本论文由英语论文网/
The Basic Requirement for Primary School English
The Basic Requirement for Primary School English postulates that the main aims ofprimary English include:
to develop pupils’ interests, self confidence and positive attitude towards learning English;
to cultivate the pupils’ language sense and enable good pronunciation and intonation;
to develop the pupils’ preliminary ability to use English in daily exchanges and lay a good basis for further study.
The specific teaching requirements are designed into two levels. Level 1 is for grade 3 and 4, Level 2 is for grade 5 and 6 (MOE Document on Primary School English Teaching, 2017). The following provides the framework of strands us，英语论文题目，英语论文题目 |
