英语课堂中的“伪活跃现象”(2)

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“Pseudo-activeness” is the result of overemphasizing the activeness of classroom atmosphere or students physical and verbal participation by intriguing students’ interests or motivations in something irrelevant to the teaching and learning objectives and overlooking the educational quality in the class. Thus, in order to better illustrate this issue, it’s necessary to clarify educational quality and classroom participation.

Findings on the previous researches show that there are generally two views on the evaluation of educational quality. As Alexander (2006) notes educational quality research is based on an input and outcome paradigm with little attention to the process. Thus this result-oriented paradigm meets the concerns of politicians and managers but offers few applied implications for teachers and students. Taking English teaching as an example, since the teaching and acquisition of language knowledge remains a key criterion to measure educational quality, most middle schools have a preference to this result-oriented approach which is easy to apply. Another view is based on a contextual or process-oriented definition of educational quality (O'Sullivan, 2006 and Zhang, 2008). This approach requires researchers to observe how discourse flows throughout a lesson, it focuses on talk and action to account for the complex and unpredictable dynamics of teaching and learning (Mercer, 2010 and Rojas Drummond and Mercer, 2003). In this view, educational quality depends on how the classroom discourse progressively unfolds and becomes meaningful for both the teachers and the students. Different from the previous one, this approach pays more attention to evaluate the teaching and cultivation of ideological and spiritual contents which are much more difficult to observe and estimate. Bearing different emphases though, the approaches based on the two views measure the educational quality by evaluating the achievement of the teaching objectives, some of which are obvious and easy to observe, while others are not. Taking English classes as examples, the teaching objectives should include language knowledge (obvious and easy to observe and estimate), language skills, affects, cultural awareness, learning strategies.

As the most important part in a lesson, what functions should classroom interaction or students participation make? Ferguson-Hessler de Jong (in Theberge, 1994) has found that active students tend to have better academic achievement, compared with those passive in participation. Astin (1999) and Tatar (2005) supported this statement by claiming that active participation in discussion makes students show higher satisfaction in the leaning process and plays an important role in achieving effective learning and in the success of education and personal development of students in the future. This is because students will learn how to think critically and enhance their intellectual development if they are an active participant in the classroom (Siti Maziha, 2010). To conclude the above findings, the function of students’ participation in class is undeniably important, but the premise is thinking, it calls for students’ deep thinking. That is to say, classroom participation should be students’ mental participation in essence if it is to function well.

Valerica Anghelachea(2012) has pointed out in her research paper “ the majority of teachers are preoccupied with the efficiency of their professional activity. They use certain teaching techniques excessively, thus missing the objectives they aim at. In many cases, the stress is laid on form, on embracing a certain conduct, which generates enjoyment for students but at the same time impresses a certain type of formalism and superficiality on the teaching activity, with negative effects in the long run.” Valerica has been aware of the phenomenon of “pseudo-activeness” in classroom teaching, but the problem is that this issue has not received due treatment which includes to do further study on it and find out ways to avoid such problem.