1.2 Purpose of the study

This study mainly focuses on the effectiveness of activities used in English class in primary school. As we know that using different activities as a kind of practice methods has become a trend recent years. But what’s the situation like in primary school English class? What’s the feature of these activities? Every activity must have a certain object as well as a theory behind it. So, in this study, the author will categorize these activities and then discuss the theoretical basis behind them. Sometimes, the teacher will spend a lot of time designing an activity that he or she believes to be effective. The key part of activity approach is the participation of students and the interactions between them. However, here is always a gap between teachers’ expect and students’ performance. On the one hand, teachers may think this activity can facilitate students’ learning. On the other hand, students may find it boring thus they don’t have the desire to participate. Or the activity is too easy or too hard for them. That is one of the problems in activity designing. Therefore, how to make activities more effective needs to be discussed. To make the study more reliable, the author will do a research in a primary school in order to collect authentic data. Through analyzing these data, the author wants to have a clear idea about the current situation of activities used in primary school English class. And also through analyzing some defects of unsuccessful activities, the author hopes to give some suggestions on how to make English classroom activities more effective.

All in all, this study has four objects. First, investigate current situation of English teaching activities. Then, categorize activities used in English class in primary school and analyze the theoretical basis. Third, discuss the effectiveness of these activities as well as the factors that may affect teaching effectiveness based on the case study in Xue Jun primary school. Last, give some practical suggestions on designing English classroom activities.

2. Literature review

2.1 Effective teaching 

“Effective teaching can be defined as teaching that successfully achieves learning by students intended by the teacher.”(C Kyriacou, 1997) Teaching effectiveness does not simply means to teach the most knowledge in the least time. According to Cui Yunhuo (1991), effectiveness means the progress students can make after teachers’ teaching. That is to say, whether the teaching is effective or not depends on how much progress students can achieve. No matter how hard the teacher or student has tried, if there is no progress, the teaching is invalid. Meanwhile, teaching cannot be isolated from learning. To achieve teaching effectiveness, teachers must create a student-centered class rather than simply follow the model of “teacher says and students listen” or “teacher asks and students answer”. To carry out effective teaching, the teacher must have a clear idea of what objective he or she wants to achieve or what learning ability he or she wants to foster. Whether the objective has been achieved is the most important standard to judge the effectiveness of teaching activity. What’s more, the body of the objective should be students themselves. 论文网

2.2 TPR and Activity approach

TPR was developed by James Asher (1966). He thought that speech directed to young children consists primarily of commands, while children respond to physically before they begin to produce verbal response. It is conducted based on the coordination of spoken and physical movement. It helps students develop listening comprehension and oral fluency by reducing their pressure and fear in an interesting learning process (Asher, 1968). In traditional classes, students are just listeners. They cannot speak until the teacher allows them to. Let alone stand up and do some actions. All they do is listening and speaking. This kind of class is dull especially for those primary school students. Students who just start to learn English may be afraid of the unknown. At this time, what the teacher needs to is to unease the nervous and to give them some confidence. TPR can create a comfortable environment thus students can have fun while learning. It is no doubt that TPR has its limitation, like it is hard for teachers to attend to all students when the size of class is beyond management. To test the effectiveness of TPR, many researchers have done plenty of studies. Compared with traditional TPR approach, Embodiment-based TPR approach seems to be more efficient in facilitating students’ vocabulary study. It is an integration of motion-sensing technology and theory of embodied cognition into the total physical response (TPR) approach. The results show that the Embodiment-based TPR approach could bring better learning retention than the conventional TPR approach. In addition, experimental group showed a highly positive level of acceptance toward the proposed learning approach. (Fan-Ray Kuo et al, 2013)