Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
According to the guidelines showed in the new curriculum, the English teachingmethods in Senior High School are changing gradually. In order to fulfill therequirements of the new teaching objectives, teachers and educators are trying tomake some innovations in their teaching styles. Most English classes used to be atraditional Chinese dominated, teacher and book-centered, examination-oriented andgrammar-translation method, while now this kind of teaching method is out of way.Teachers have got to take actions to cultivate a different teaching atmosphere to makeour class more active and interesting.As we all know, the traditional teaching method place more attention onlanguage usage rather than on the students’ communicative competence. Hence, a newway of teaching method appears with the requirements, which is calledstudents-centered classroom. With the request coming, small group discussion comesinto being in our real classroom. Small group discussion receives a warm welcomeamong students since it encourages students to participate in the class activities ratherthan just listen to the lecture. Small group discussion "provides opportunities forstudent initiation, for face to face give and take, for practice in negotiation of meaning,for extended conversational exchange"(Brown 1994). Studies show that if just half ofthe class time is spent in group-work, individual practice time can increase five-foldover that supplied by whole-class traditional methodology. (Long and Porter. 1985)
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
Small group discussion does help to offer a more relaxing and cooperativeclassroom atmosphere. Students in English classes are able to talk freely of thelanguage. They will feel much more comfortable when facing the pressure of beinglistened to by their teachers and peers. On this condition they are willing to speak outtheir inner ideas in public. In this paper, the author aims to reflect the current situationof the implementation of the small group discussion in English classroom of SeniorHigh School, exploring whether small group discussion can actually improve theexam marks of the English learners and then analysis how small group discussion canbe administered to achieve it. The research intends to answer the following questionsspecifically: 1. what is the relationship between SGD and students’ exam marks? 2.What factors affect the implementation of SGD? 3. How can SGD be distributed inorder to improve the exam marks of the English learners? In order to answer thesethree questions, the author did a large number of observations and experiments. Thelong process of teaching and preparation for this paper offers the author much time tothink how to improve the class interest of English learning as a whole. As we all know,high school students are facing many important tests, thus many teachers choose toteach in the traditional way to make full use of the class time. On the other hand, theymay forget that interest is the best teacher. Efficiency doubles with interest on the road.So the final purpose of this paper is to check if the small group discussion can arousethe students’ interest and improve the actual marks in the end.Even though small group discussion has been put into use in real classroom,there still exist many kinds of problems，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文
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