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In order to meet the challenges, it requires efforts from various places to overcome all of the difficulties. First of all, the government should make more educational investment to enrich the situation. For example, they can make a change of the facilities to help students create a better language environment. They can provide some useful teaching resources, such as school library and multi-media room; teachers should improve themselves in teaching ability so that they may stimulate students’ interest in learning English. The new National English Curriculum is affected by many factors when it is used in schools. Though all of the problems can’t be solved by English teachers, they can try their best to help students by improving their own ability in English and changing their teaching methods to help the students in rural middle schools.
II. Main Challenges of English Teaching in Rural Middle Schools
2.1 Challenges of Teachers
As is known to us, rural areas’ education quality is an important factor which is related to the future of the most parts of farmers’ offspring. In rural areas, there are many challenges such as lacking of excellent teachers and useful equipment. The levels of English in rural areas are commonly lower than those of the cities’. English is a new subject to students in rural middle school. It is strange to the students and the children usually pay no attention to it. Some of the students even can’t recognize twenty six letters after graduation from junior middle school. What is more, some English teachers don’t regard it as a main subject. Thus the eligible English teacher is seriously wanted. However, some English teachers are transferred from other subjects and some want to leave for a good school. Therefore, teachers are incapable of teaching English in a good way or they are unwilling to do it.
2.1.1 Teachers’ Low Proficiency in English Teaching
For any educational change, teachers are the crucial factors as they are the agents for implementing the new ideas (White 198).One of the most serious problems is the lack of qualified English teachers in rural middle schools. Few of the English teachers receive professional or formal education of foreign language in rural areas, so they do not have high professional quality in English.
There are two important problems for English teachers in rural areas. The first one is that they lack proficiency in English, especially in spoken English. For example, their pronunciation and intonation are not accurate and their oral expressions are not good. Chinese teachers are not good at oral English because they are not native speakers of English. Another reason is that many of them have never been to English-speaking countries, so most of them are not familiar with the foreign language. They do not have native language competence and a good command of the culture of English-speaking countries. The next problem is their teaching methods which are traditional. Teacher was the center of traditional teaching and the instruction was structure-based and drill repetition (Sun 70). Teachers seldom ask questions to students or communicate with them in the classroom. What they would do is just try to take every minute to stuff the knowledge into the children and students received the knowledge passively. Consequently, students will not have good abilities in communication in the traditional teaching method.
2.1.2 Problems of Teaching Equipment
In rural areas, many schools put financial difficulties in the first place, since English teaching equipment and construction is still unable to satisfy the actual needs. The rural schools are not equipped with the multimedia laboratory, language laboratory, recorders, teaching in VCD, English teaching equipment and software resources and so on. Especially for those schools in remote areas, for the economic reasons, the teaching equipment and devices will be less, and even a low standard of language laboratory would be a luxury for them.