How to Stimulate Students' Interests in English Class

Author: Huang Fengying Shuitai Junior High School

Abstract

How to stimulate students' interests in English class is a hard work. We mustdeal with it according to the actual situation. And this paper make a tentative analysis about it. And it also give four methods to deal with it.

Key words: Stimulate, Interest, English class, Students, Teachers

As the saying goes, " the interest is the best teacher ",that is to say, it's important for teachers to stimulate students' interests in teaching program, especially for English teachers. But it's a difficult question to do it correctly and effectively, now I'll make a tentative analysis about this question.

To myself, I teach English in Grade7 in junior high school, and the material used in our school is Ren'ai Project English, which is published by Hunan Education Press. In my opinion, this teaching material is very good. First, it's very easy. whether students have learned English in pPrimary school or not, they can learn it by themselves. Second, there are lots of pictures in each page, and most of the pictures are very lovely and all contrary to the lessons. Last, the material follows the principle which proceeds in an orderly way. All of these advantages can stimulate students' interests in English at the beginning, but after a long time, I find that most of the students don't like English any more , even some of them don't want to learn English any more! This is so terrible. So how to make them be interested in English is the most important question. But to solve this question, we must stand form the students to think about their abilities and their attitudes toward English.

All of my students are form rural areas, they don't have much money to buy many books about English, most of them only have a book which was written in English, that is their English books. And they are very shy to speak English with friends in class, so they have no chance to speak English. And they often speak their local language in school, even in English class. From all of these, we can know that teaching English to students in rural area is a arduous task.

Here, I will make a tentative analysis about how to simulate students' interests in English. To make it more effectively, I think, to be an English teacher, we can do as the following.

First of all, according to the psychological characteristics of the students in Grade7 inthe junior high school, I think playing some games in class is a good way. We all know that the students like playing games very much, so we can make them learn English from the games. We can begin a lesson by asking students to sing a song , dance or do some chants and so on. Here is an example in my class : when we learn Topic3 in Unit5(Topic3:We had a wonderful party), we know the important point and the difficult point is the past simple tense, especially the past forms of irregular verbs. In my lesson, I ask some students to come to the blackboard and do some actions after revision(according to the verbal phrases said by the teacher, such as: sing a song , dance, play basketball, perform kungfu, do some cleaning...), then let other students answer the questions: What did she/he do? to lead to the regular and irregular past forms of verbs. In this class, I find that many students want to perform in the front of the class, and the other students who watch their actions are very happy and excited. When I say the verbs in simple tense, they can say the past forms of the verbs quickly, and after class, they can remember the verbs easily. So I think, playing some games in the class is a good way to stimulate students' interests in studying English.

Second, create a good atmosphere to foster interests in learning English. In rural areas, teacher can let students watch some nice English movies so that they can learn some oral English and something about English countries from them. Teacher can do some contests about English, such as, English writing contest, English speaking contest, or make English cards .etc. This part not only depends on the English teachers, but also the other people. It requests schools, families and society to work together. In order to work together, teachers, parents and people around them should know how to use the Appreciation Education, try to praise them if they do it well.

Third, to be students, they must know about the importance of learning English. According to my students, although they learned English in primary school, they also don't know why they learn English. Most of them think that English is not important as Chinese and Mathematics, even a few of them think English is rubbish. So they don't realize the necessity of English. According to this situation, teachers can tell the importance of English and then illustrate the usages of English in daily life, to enable students to correct their attitudes towards learning English, so that they can set main targets and enhance the enthusiasm of learning in English.

At last, to be an English teacher, we must improve our teaching qualities(moral character,knowledge of languages and cultural knowledge, verbal expression and the arts,education reform and research capabilities. etc.) so that we can use different ways of teaching skills and techniques to guide the students to master English proficiency.And the students all like a teacher who knows all about the knowledge.

From all of the above, we can know that stimulating students' interests in English is a hard work, because it demands all the people work together. So we must try our best to do it well.