Hence, study on the students’ language learning opportunities in EFL classes from the perspective of classroom discourse connecting with the time models in classroom processes possibly can be the more reasonable and valuable way to improve our EFL classes, and which is the core discussion of this article as well as the main task that has been analyzed in the research.

3 Methodology

3.1 The Participants of the Research

The participants of this research are 164 students and 4 English teachers from two ordinary middle schools in Zhejiang province. The students are randomly selected from 4 classes in different grades including Junior 1, Junior 2, Senior 1 and Senior 2. For them all Chinese is their native language and they study English as a foreign language in the school.

There are 74 girls and 90 boys among the students and 32 students are from Junior 1, 40 students are from Junior 2, 46 students are from Senior 1 and the rest are from Senior 2. By the time of the study, these learners had all had over 5 years of English learning experience in elementary schools and secondary schools. The teachers who participate in the research are the English teachers who respectively come from these 4 grades and all of them are experienced teachers who have more than 5 years teaching experience. 

3.2 The Instruments of the Research 

In order to conduct the survey, three main instruments are used into this study, including 8 classroom observation records, two questionnaires and one set of interlocution of interview on both teachers and students. 

The first questionnaire on the situation of English learning opportunities in EFL classes of 14 items which are pided into three parts: inpidual information, situation of English learning classes and suggestions to enhance EFL courses. The second questionnaire is Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) provided by Gardner R.C (2004) that is one of the most authoritative learning motivation test tools up to now. 

The classroom observation records are the most important instruments of the research, and the content is presented in the form of transcripts to support the analysis. Interviews are designed to elicit qualitative data from the participants. The details of the two questionnaires and modeling transcripts of the records are clearly set out in the appendix. 

3.3 The Procedure of the Research

The first step of the research procedure is the classroom observation. 8 speaking and listening type English classes across grades are selected. All the lessons in the four classes (Class A in Junior 1, Class B in Junior 2, Class C in Senior 1, Class D in Senior 2) last 45 minutes and there are around 40 students in each class. The records were made during the classroom observation and later they were recorded in the form of transcriptions to support further analysis.  

The questionnaires were administered to 164 students. In order to avoid unnecessary problems concerning language understanding and guarantee more spontaneous responses, the questionnaire on the situation of English learning opportunities in EFL classes distributed to students in Chinese. However, the questionnaire Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) offered to participants is English version as the expressions of the items are all in simple English. Questionnaire with any questions left blank were taken as not valid. Therefore, finally 149 questionnaires were used to do analysis after carefully thorough check.   来,自|优;尔`论^文/网www.youerw.com

After that, 16 students and their teachers were selected to take part in the interview part. The quantitative and qualitative data gained in the process was organized to do the subsequent analysis and discussion.

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