In recent years, many colleges and universities have tried to reform the English teaching mode and adopt the stratified teaching experiment of college English, which not only follows the teaching principle of teaching students in accordance with their aptitude and respecting their individual differences, but also meets the basic requirements of college English course teaching. English stratified teaching has achieved initial results, and students' overall language application ability has been significantly improved. This paper comprehensively comments on the problems that should be paid attention to in the main links of hierarchical teaching, such as class placement, curriculum setting and teaching process, and emphatically analyzes the main problems existing in its specific operation at present, especially puts forward corresponding solutions and improvement measures for controversial aspects such as teacher allocation and teaching evaluation.
Keywords: college English teaching, hierarchical teaching, individual differences in English ability
This paper attempts to reform the teaching mode of college English, advocates teaching students in accordance with their aptitude, and explores a new language teaching practice mode by adopting the experiment of hierarchical teaching of English courses in combination with students' actual English level and learning needs. There are many aspects in this exploration process that deserve our reflection.
1 the concept of hierarchical teaching
The theoretical background of hierarchical teaching is very far-reaching. Supported by the theory of "zone of proximal development" put forward by Vygotsky, an educational psychologist in the former Soviet Union, zone of proximal development refers to the distance between the foundation and level that students already have and the level that students can reach under the guidance of teachers. When teachers can fully understand the students' recent development zone, and then use the contradiction between the students' current development level and the level of the recent development zone to organize teaching, it can promote the students' rapid and sustainable development and accelerate the development speed. Confucius, a great educator in China, put forward the theory of "teaching students in accordance with their aptitude". Under the same training goal, he put forward different requirements and gave different education according to the specific conditions of the educated's ability, specialty, personality and original foundation. These teaching theories all reflect the feasibility and necessity of hierarchical teaching.
Hierarchical teaching takes "teaching students according to their aptitude" as the basic teaching principle. However, hierarchical teaching is not an idealized implementation of the principle of teaching students in accordance with their aptitude. Instead, we should rely on the existing conditions and experience, take teaching students in accordance with their aptitude as the fundamental principle, reform the disadvantages of traditional teaching, and establish an operable educational model system. Hierarchical teaching makes different teaching plans and objectives according to students' different learning levels and abilities, fully arouses students' learning enthusiasm and initiative, and makes all students improve and develop on the original basis. Hierarchical teaching also makes us aware of the change of teaching concept. We should change the former teacher-centered teaching mode which only teaches language knowledge and skills, and gradually establish a new teaching mode which is student-centered and pays attention to cultivating language application ability and autonomous learning ability.
2. The implementation of stratified teaching of college English
2. 1 Placement. Reasonable stratification is the basis of stratified teaching. Generally speaking, colleges and universities require teachers to use high-reliability and high-efficiency test papers in accordance with the principles of respect, democracy and friendship. According to the English level reflected in the basic examination, the freshmen of non-college English majors are divided into AB levels according to the same college or major, and the number is basically the same. Students attend classes according to different classes. At the same time, by adopting mobile stratification, students who have made great progress can enter the next level according to their own learning situation, while students who have regressed or have learning difficulties at this level can enter the next level. The level adjustment between students is carried out after each semester.
2.2 Curriculum. Most colleges and universities in China adopt a four-semester college English curriculum, which is a public compulsory course. Each semester's courses are divided into comprehensive English and listening and speaking exercises. The textbooks selected by most universities are New Century Series by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press and New Horizon College English Series by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Comprehensive English course mainly focuses on reading teaching, translation and writing guidance. Teachers teach the important and difficult points of language knowledge, the requirements and methods of reading skills, translation skills and writing knowledge, and students mainly receive information.
Audio-visual, oral and practical courses are conducted in multimedia classrooms or voice laboratories, with listening and speaking training as the mainstay and personalized guidance. Students focus on language output, and a few qualified universities break down the curriculum into small classes.
2.3 Teaching process. When teaching students at the corresponding level, teachers should delete and expand the teaching materials and supporting courseware according to the actual situation of the class, so as to improve the teaching effect and realize the teaching objectives. The teaching of comprehensive English courses, especially audio-visual courses and practical courses, is completed in a multimedia teaching environment. In their spare time, students can preview, review, do homework and other self-study activities through the network environment such as study room and campus network learning platform, and deeply learn the courseware made by teachers.
Teachers use online courseware, electronic CD-ROM and other forms, and students conduct autonomous learning, assign the tasks of each unit of autonomous learning, require the completion of content-related homework, and implement network monitoring and answering questions for students' autonomous learning. Teachers' tracking records, students' online self-study time, exercise completion and assessment results are all included in the process evaluation and summative evaluation.
3 existing problems and solutions
Implementing the hierarchical teaching reform of college English fully embodies the requirements of quality education today. Teaching students in accordance with their aptitude, fully respecting students' individual differences, guiding them according to the situation, stimulating students' learning consciousness and initiative, and making students change from passive learning to active learning. Targeted teaching is conducive to improving classroom efficiency, thus improving students' overall English language application ability, enhancing students' learning confidence, especially their autonomous learning ability, and promoting the all-round and harmonious development of students' personality. In addition, by effectively organizing the teaching of students at all levels, teachers' organizational ability and adaptability have been greatly exercised, and these challenges are conducive to the quality training of teachers.
At the same time, we should also clearly realize that hierarchical teaching is still in the experimental stage, and some problems and disputes left over from the practice still need to be discussed and improved in future teaching.
3. 1 teacher allocation. As far as colleges and universities implementing hierarchical teaching are concerned, most of them are equipped with teachers according to administrative classes, that is, one teacher prepares two sets of lesson plans for students of two levels in one class, which confuses the levels and reverses the lesson plans, so it is difficult for teachers to grasp the balance from time to time. Moreover, the amount of preparing lessons and making courseware is large, and the evaluation scale for students is different. In order to solve this problem, we can break the practice of allocating teachers according to administrative classes, adopt the plan of horizontally allocating teachers according to students' level, and allocate teachers according to teachers' expertise, so that teachers at the same level can form teaching teams, effectively use network resources, prepare lessons collectively, work together, learn from each other's strengths, and finally realize resource integration and sharing. This not only helps teachers to help and communicate with each other, master some effective teaching methods and improve their scientific research ability, but also helps students to know their learning motivation and needs in time and teach students in accordance with their aptitude better.
3.2 Teaching evaluation. Combined with the usual classroom performance and final papers, students and teachers at different levels are comprehensively evaluated. A-level students not only assess the contents of textbooks, but also include various extracurricular materials. B-level students mainly assess textbooks, appropriately increase the flexible use of knowledge, and strive to firmly grasp the basic knowledge, which is obviously less difficult than the former. However, the evaluation based on hierarchical teaching will be unfair to the final scholarship evaluation and the selection of outstanding students.
At present, most colleges and universities in China evaluate scholarships according to administrative classes.
In this way, due to the different difficulty and content of the exam, the final scores of students of different levels may not fully reflect their English level. In the operation, it can be adjusted appropriately. The teacher collectively evaluates the difficulty of the test paper and the students' grades, and negotiates a certain coefficient to make the overall adjustment.
3.3 Students' psychology. After the class is stratified, students will have some psychological changes, especially those who are classified as B-level, and some students will feel inferior or even reject English learning. Teachers need to guide students to correctly and actively understand the original intention of hierarchical teaching, observe more on weekdays, communicate more with students, understand their psychological status, and give them more encouragement and positive feedback. For individual students with great psychological changes, they should be given more care and help, and even individual counseling. If necessary, they can contact the class teacher to help them.
In addition, most college students often unconsciously take English test as the ultimate goal of learning English, blindly attach importance to reading and writing ability, and neglect the cultivation of listening and speaking ability. Once they passed the grade examination, the motivation to learn English disappeared immediately. Obviously, the phenomenon of high scores and low abilities in English is extremely inconsistent with the teaching objectives. Teachers need to actively guide students to change their ideas and cultivate students' good study habits and autonomous learning ability.
3.4 Class management. There are many problems in teaching management after the reorganization of hierarchical teaching classes, which need to be managed from many aspects: after hierarchical teaching, students in the same class come from different administrative classes, which makes it easy to get rid of the shackles of the original administrative class, and at the same time makes it more difficult for the original class teacher to know the performance and learning situation of the students in his administrative class in time. In order to alleviate this phenomenon, hierarchical teaching needs multi-party cooperation, between teachers and class teachers, between class teachers and students, and between class teachers and educational departments. In addition, it is necessary to improve the educational administration inquiry system, so that it can timely feedback the evaluation data of students at all stages, which is convenient for multi-party inquiry and management.
3.5 Configuration of hardware facilities. In order to make full use of the network environment, schools need to provide a good classroom teaching platform, including multimedia classrooms, autonomous learning rooms, online learning platforms, and even campus broadcasting, libraries, educational inquiry systems and so on. On this basis, teaching can provide students with more visual and auditory stimuli, simplify boring abstract words or grammar, and transform the original lecturing English teaching into personalized autonomous learning mode, thus strengthening students' memory and improving teaching effect. More importantly, the cross-cooperation of various teaching resources has greatly cultivated students' English autonomous learning ability, which is a very important goal in college English teaching.
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