Application of Anchored Instructions in Middle School English Reading Teaching from the Perspective of Thinking Quality ()
1. Introduction
In 2022, the Ministry of Education promulgated the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education, which puts forward deeper requirements for training junior middle school students in the new era. Core literacy is divided into language competence, learning ability, thinking quality and cultural awareness. Among them, thinking quality can be divided into logical, critical and innovative thinking. Specifically, it refers to whether students can analyze and solve problems independently, whether they have cross-cultural awareness, and whether they can view things from different perspectives, make correct value judgments and express their own views. Therefore, in reading teaching, teachers should not only let students know the surface meaning and understand the author’s writing logic, but also deeply understand the related cultural situation, critically think about the author’s views, and put forward their own views or relevant suggestions.
In order to complete the new requirements of the new curriculum Standard, a new kind of teaching model is desperately needed to improve students’ learning interest and motivation. Anchored teaching mode is relatively simple to operate which emphasizes the creation of situations, linking textbooks with real situations, penetrating cultural background and attracting students’ interest. Through applying the anchored instruction, it is more beneficial for teachers to enrich educational theory and accumulate their experience. Furthermore, it can also improve students’ academic performance.
Therefore, this kind of teaching model can encourage students to have the courage to think independently and learn cooperatively.
2. Literature Review
2.1. Anchored Instruction
There are some examples of combining the novel teaching method with reading class. Professor Zhang Xuexin put forward the novel classroom teaching the PAD class. Teachers’ presentation in this class functions as “scaffolding” to provide a clear explanation of new knowledge to develop the Zone of Proximal Development of individual learners [1] . Feipeng Li and Xuwei Li (2020) [2] found that compared with the traditional approach to English teaching, applying the POA Theory in English reading and writing can promote students’ ability to think and practice. Whitehead (1929) [3] first proposed the concept of anchored teaching method. This kind of teaching method advocates that learning and teaching activities should be carried out with “anchors”. An “anchor” is a real event or real problem that is closely related to the learning topic. Therefore, teachers need to design different learning situations to meet the different needs of students.
Then, the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV) carried out a lot of research and established the anchored instruction. CTGV (1992) [4] believed that by constructing situations through videos, teachers constantly elicit questions, and students may fall into cognitive conflicts. They can not only solve problems raised by teachers with existing experience but also increase new knowledge. Through research and data analysis, Bottge, Toland and Gassaway (2015) [5] combined with previous research, and proposed a new anchored teaching method (enhanced anchored instruction) whose main meaning is that students’ study in video-based courses and engage in some hands-on projects to improve students’ computer and problem-solving ability.
Compared with foreign research, anchored teaching is a new topic in China. The famous Chinese professor He Kekang (1997) [6] first summarized the procedures of anchored Instruction. According to He Kekang’s theory, the main procedures of the anchored instruction model consist of the following five procedures:
1) Creating situations: The anchored teaching model requires teachers to create real situations and encourage learning to occur in the same or similar situations in reality, so that students can easily extract existing experiences and actively participate in learning activities, which can stimulate students’ learning interest.
2) Setting questions: In the above situation, we should select the real event or problem that is closely related to the current learning theme and regard the relevant event as a central content of learning. In anchored teaching, the selected event or problem is the “anchor”.
3) Learning autonomously: Autonomous learning is a modern learning method that corresponds to traditional receiving learning. It regards students as the key subjects of learning and achieves learning goals through independent analysis, exploration, practice, questioning, and creation.
4) Learning collaboratively: Students face different viewpoints, they can supplement, correct, and form their own understanding of the problems and deepen each student’s understanding of current problems by discussing and exchanging ideas. Cooperative activities in learning are beneficial to the development of individual thinking ability and the enhancement of communication ability among individual students.
5) Evaluating effectively: Based on the anchored instruction, the learning process is the process in which students solve practical problems independently. Teachers evaluate this teaching mode by observing and recording students’ performance during the learning process.
2.2. Thinking Quality
The curriculum standard defines thinking quality as the ability and level of students’ thinking in the aspects of logic, criticism and innovation, which reflects the mental characteristics of the core quality of English subjects. The development of thinking quality helps to enhance students’ ability to analyze and solve problems, so that they can observe and understand the world from a cross-cultural perspective, and make correct value judgments on things.
Since the 1950s, psychologists began to explore thinking quality. For example, Stemberg (1985) [7] proposed the ternary intelligence theory, including the intelligence component sub-theory, the intelligence situation sub-theory and the intelligence experience sub-theory, which triggered a lot of research on the cultivation of thinking skills. Marzano (1998) [8] divided thinking into core thinking ability, thinking process, critical thinking, creative thinking, metacognition and self-system, and proposed a combination framework of thinking teaching and classroom teaching, which provides method guidance for thinking training. Since the 1990s, the research on thinking quality in the field of education has gradually increased. Donovan Peterson, et al. (1992) [9] found that teachers’ high-order thinking teaching skills will have an impact on students’ thinking ability.
Lin Chongde (2017) [10] , a domestic scholar, pointed out that thinking quality is one of the six elements of the system structure of thinking. After in-depth research, he further summarized that thinking quality refers to the individual characteristics of people’s thinking, which reflects the differences of individuals’ intelligence or thinking level, mainly including profundity, flexibility, creativity, agility, criticism, and openness.
With the curriculum reform, thinking quality has attracted more and more research from experts and scholars in English teaching. For example, Lu Ziwen (2016) [11] demonstrates the importance of English subject to the cultivation of students’ thinking from the consciousness level of thinking activities and emphasizes that the interpretation of textbooks is of great significance to the development of students’ thinking quality. Xia Guming [12] believes that the quality of thinking, as a part of the core accomplishment of the subject, promotes each other with students’ language ability, cultural awarness and learning ability. According to the characteristics of English subjects, students are bound to carry out thinking training in eight aspects: observation, comparison, analysis, inference, induction, concept construction, critical thinking and creative thinking. Based on Bloom’s taxonomy of educational goals, Dong Qiong [13] distinguished six levels of thinking. Different types of activities are set up in the three links before, while and after reading to promote the development of students’ thinking quality.
3. Research Procedure
In the experiment, the author will use a variety of methods to conduct the experiment, such as the questionnaire before and after the experiment, interview, and classroom observation. In order to make the experiment process clearer, this chapter will show in detail the teaching design and teaching process of the anchored teaching model.
3.1. Research Questions
Based on the Theory of Interaction between Language and Thinking, Situational Cognition Theory and Bloom’s Taxonomy, this study aims to raise two research questions:
1) Can the application of anchored instruction improve middle school students’ English reading ability and reading interest?
2) Can the application of anchored instruction in English reading teaching arouse students’ thinking ability?
3.2. Research Subjects
The experiment selects one class of students in Shaoxing Qiujing Middle School as the research subjects. Students in this class will be taught by the same teacher, and use the same teaching content. The experiment period of this study will be my internship, about 13 weeks. The anchored instruction will be applied in the class.
3.3. Research Instruments
In this research, questionnaire, interview, and classroom observation will be applied to know students’ thinking quality level and their interest in English reading. The questionnaire (APPENDIX) will be conducted before the experiment. After the experiment, the interview will be designed to collect teachers’ and students’ interactions and responses to the anchored teaching method. During the period of my internship, students’ performance in the English reading class will be recorded.
3.4. Specific Teaching Case
In order to clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of anchored instruction in English reading teaching, the author chooses one unit to give a sample teaching procedure to illustrate the application of the anchored instruction model. The teaching material is selected from Grade 9, unit 5, Beauty in Common Things.
Teaching objectives:
By the end of the class, students will be able to
1) Learn to use some basic words and expressions about Chinese traditional culture and consolidate the passive voice they have learned in the previous class.
2) Appreciate the passage and think about the deeper meaning of real beauty and beauty in common things.
3) Cultivate critical thinking and creative thinking and help students form the right values and positive emotional attitudes.
4) Realize that beauty lies in ordinary things and we should have the eyes to appreciate it and be proud of our traditional Chinese culture and have awareness of spreading Chinese culture.
Teaching key and difficult point:
The key points of this lesson are that firstly students can master the usage of the important words and expressions in the passage. Secondly, students can develop reading abilities, such as skimming, scanning, analyzing and sentence-guessing abilities. The difficult points of this lesson are that students can realize the real beauty and transfer, apply and innovate between the Chinese culture and foreign culture.
Teaching Procedure:
Pre-reading:
Step 1 Creating Situation (5 minutes)
Creating situation is the first and the most essential step of the application of the anchored instruction model, which can bring students into a near-real situation by watching the video.
According to the teaching material, teacher uses the multimedia to play the video about “Chinese traditional art”, first initially trigger the start of students’ active learning and enlighten students to think and explore Chinese traditional culture, broaden students’ horizons, help students understand Chinese traditional folk art, discover the traditional folk art as well as cultivate students’ patriotism, train students’ thinking ability, and improve their critical thinking ability.
Questioning and Answering:
T: According to the video, do you know some traditional art? Please tell me something about it. Ss: They are paper cutting, face changing, shadow figures, Chinese clay art, sky lanterns.
T: Good, so did anyone ever try to take part in these traditional art activities? Ss: Yeah, I once flew to Kongming Lantern and prayed with my family.
T: Excellent.
Step 2 Setting Question (3 minutes)
The “anchor” in the anchored teaching method refers to a problem situation or real situation that can stimulate students’ cognitive conflict and curiosity. The “anchor” given today is that students should find out traditional art forms in order to further appreciate Chinese traditional culture, and then all the teaching activities will be organized around the “anchor”.
Questioning and Answering:
T: Dear class, by just watching this video, I think everyone has a profound feeling about different forms of Chinese traditional culture. Through this video, we have learned the method of making and using traditional Chinese art. The diligent ancients made exquisite works of art with various tools, making common things beautiful. Today, we are going to study more in our textbook, which also focuses on the Chinese traditional art.
Before the task begins, the teacher asks some questions about the background information of this passage to stimulate their thinking.
T: Have you ever noticed the beauty in common things in our daily life?
S1: Yes, beauty is everywhere in life. There is no doubt that the beauty of nature, such as flowers in the spring and snow in the winter.
S2: The deepest love of parents is the most beautiful.
T: So does anyone enjoy the beauty of traditional Chinese culture?
S1: I learned about traditional Chinese culture by watching some variety shows, such as the Chinese Poetry Conference.
S2: So do I, I always watch the Spring Festival Gala and join in the Lantern Festival.
While-reading
Step 3: Learning Autonomously (15minutes)
Students read the Beauty in Common Things article independently and explore the information points in the text through some pictures and specific information to find real beauty. The teacher provides the students with scaffolding help and then guides students to learn independently.
T: Students, today we have to learn the article Beauty in Common Things. You are supposed to find the structure of this passage and then you need to independently complete the following tasks.
Individual work: Fast reading (5 mins)
Activity 1 skim and choose
The teacher asks students to read the passage quickly for the first time and choose the structure of this passage. Which one is the structure of the passage as shown in Figure 1? Here is a tip for you: Pay more attention to the first sentence of each paragraph.
Activity 2 Find and circle
Find out the topic sentence in each paragraph and circle them out in Table 1.
The intention of this step is to train students’ basic reading ability to get the general idea and the structure of the passage.
Individual work: careful reading (20 mins)
Activity 3 Read and fill
Students read the passage carefully and find out three traditional art forms and the materials.
T: Read Para.2, 3 & 4 carefully and try to find out―What are the three traditional art forms? What are they made of? Here is a tip for you, pay more attention to the first sentence of each Para.
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Table 2. Material of traditional art.
Activity 4 Read for the third time and find out the symbols
Students are to read the passage again and find out the symbols of these three traditional art forms as shown in Table 3. Teacher asks students: “What are the symbols of these art forms?”
The intention of this step is to help students comprehend the detailed information of the passage through various reading skills such as skimming, and scanning. Meanwhile to train students’ autonomous learning ability.
Step 4: Learning Cooperatively (10 minutes)
According to the “anchor” thrown before, group members can communicate and share their own points freely with others, thus they can cooperate in learning, solve their own difficult problems, and finally achieve the teaching objectives. Finally, the teacher guides the whole class to summarize what they have learned in the class together. During the group cooperative study period, the group activity is organized by the group leader, each group member communicates and shares his own ideas, and then supplemented by other team members.
Post-reading
Activity 5 Read the title again and discuss in pairs:
After reading the whole passage, the teacher asks students to read the title again and para1 to get the true meaning of beauty and lead students to appreciate our Chinese culture. Students are able to work in groups of four to discuss and express their ideas.
T: Q1 What is the beauty of common things?
Q2 What does this “beauty” mean?
Q3 Can you describe the beautiful thing you see in your daily life?
Activity 5 Group work
Students work in groups of four to write a speech and then present it in front of the class.
The teacher presents some pictures of other Chinese traditional art forms to create another new situation and some useful expressions and difficult words. They can work in groups of four to write a speech. They can talk about such as the materials, the symbols, the history, their feelings and the protection of Chinese traditional art forms.
The intention of this step is to help students put what they’ve learned into practical use and also integrate reading and writing skills naturally, meanwhile to develop students’ cooperation ability and thinking quality.
Step 5 Evaluating (10 minutes)
In the whole class, the teacher observes and records the students’ true reflections
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Table 3. Symbols of traditional art.
and performance of the “anchor” at anytime and anywhere. The teachers give some comments to all the groups and give some suggestions. The anchored teaching process is a process for students to solve problems. And the learning process of students can directly reflect the learning effect of students. In a word, the anchored instruction model emphasizes the “student-centered” teaching mode.
Each group should send representatives to show and group’s learning results, and of course, they can also put forward their own views as shown in Table 4. Other groups should listen carefully and give certain opinions and suggestions. Each group should communicate and learn from each other. Both teachers and students themselves should give effective evaluation and assessment.
The intention of this checklist table is to better evaluate students’ classroom performance and integrate listening, speaking, reading and writing from multiple dimensions.
Step 6: Homework
The teacher briefly summarizes what they learned today, and stresses the mind map and the formula. The teacher assigns the homework from two levels. The compulsory Homework is that students should get more familiar with the passage and try to retell it. The optional homework is that students may choose to revise their speech and write a short passage to introduce one of the traditional Chinese art forms.
The intention of different levels of homework is to meet different needs for different levels of students.
4. Data Collection and Analysis
4.1. Analysis of the Results of the Questionnaires
The questionnaire (Appendix) about English reading interest is distributed to several teachers before the experiment. The questionnaire containing 20 questions is distributed to 4 teachers. The questionnaire concerns whether the students’ thinking quality has been improved and what teaching method the teacher used in class.
According to the survey, we found that before the experiment, the four teachers all have some understanding of the concept of thinking quality, and had once incorporated thinking quality into the teaching design. They hold a positive attitude about the significance of thinking quality to the physical and mental development of students. One teacher occasionally used this method. In the teaching of reading, teachers often use different critical thinking methods and skills to trace the causes of students’ wrong answers to further understand students’ thinking modes. As for the application of mind mapping in reading class, two teachers occasionally use it. Half of the teachers pay more attention to the application of language knowledge, focusing on scores, while lacking the cultivation of students’ thinking ability. Speculation, questioning and other methods are often used by teachers in reading teaching, but other methods are rarely used and are relatively simple.
All teachers pay attention to the autonomy of students and adopt the student-oriented teaching method. The application of the situational teaching method to knowledge transfer was achieved by only two teachers in class. Through anchored teaching, teachers agree that students’ logical thinking ability, innovative thinking ability and so on have been improved to some extent.
This questionnaire to some extent indicates the feasibility of anchored teaching.
4.2. Analysis of the Results of the Interviews
The interview is conducted at the end of the class. Ten students are randomly selected for face-to-face interviews to understand students’ attitudes and opinions on anchored instruction teaching model in English reading teaching. This experiment is designed for a class of 35 students, 10 students represent the low, medium and high grades. The results of the interview can be used as a supplement to the questionnaire analysis.
4.2.1. Teachers’ Understanding of Anchored Instruction
Before the experiment, in order to better understand the development of students’ thinking quality, three middle school English teachers were interviewed. The interview for the teachers provides some information that classroom observation cannot offer.
1) Can the application of anchored instruction improve middle school students’ English reading ability and arouse students’ thinking quality?
2) What do you think of the development status of students’ thinking quality? What are the problems?
3) What kind of reading activities do you think can improve students’ thinking quality?
For the first question, we know that most teachers have a certain understanding of anchored teaching. Anchored teaching connects theoretical knowledge with practical problems, focuses on cultivating students’ autonomous learning ability and cooperative problem-solving abilities, emphasizes that the use of modern technological means to assist teaching meets the current requirements for talent training at home and abroad, and can help students to deeply understand the text in reading class. Therefore, it is favored by some teachers, but not all teachers really apply it to the actual reading teaching. Some teachers only list their teaching design without exploring how it actually works in actual class. From the above, we can conclude that few teachers associate anchored teaching with thinking qualities under the background of New Curriculum Standards.
When it comes to the second question, teachers are more or less aware of the concept of core literacy and believe that thinking quality plays a fundamental guiding role in students’ autonomous learning. Teachers’ one-sided understanding of thinking quality leads to problems in the cultivation of students’ thinking quality. The current problem is that teachers interpret the thinking quality just as critical thinking. As a result, debate or questioning activities are often designed in the post-reading stage of the reading teaching to allow students to put forward different views on one aspect of the topic in the text.
The other is the lack of emotional involvement in the cultivation of thinking quality in English classrooms. Wei Yidong and Zhou Zhenhua (2015) [14] pointed out that “cognitive science shows that thinking, as a complex high-level cognitive activity, not only includes rational processes such as reasoning, decision making and problem-solving but also includes emotional factors related to thinking in the cognitive process.” It can be seen that, as the starting point of human consciousness and memory, emotion plays an important role in the development of thinking. However, in classroom teaching, some teachers often lack emotional intervention when training students’ thinking quality.
For the third question, teachers can choose the most suitable method to carry out thinking quality training according to the characteristics and content of discourse, teaching objectives, junior middle school students’ reading level and other factors. All three teachers mentioned the application of mind mapping in reading teaching. Mind mapping reflects hierarchical relationships and is beneficial for training students’ divergent thinking. In addition, teachers also put forward question chains and situation inquiry respectively, which is closely related to anchored teaching. The question chain reflects a deep understanding of the text and trains students’ logical thinking. Situational inquiry reflects understanding beyond text and trains students’ critical and innovative thinking.
4.2.2. Students’ Ability to Develop Thinking Quality
In the regular reading teaching model, there are still problems existing in today’s English class. Teachers are more willing to lay emphasis on developing students’ test skills, rather than students’ personalities and characters. This makes reading class into “one-size fits all” method, grammar class and exercise class. In class, students are just forced to memorize knowledge points and analyze sentence structure but neglect the connotation of the article from a holistic perspective, feel the author’s point of view and think independently. Secondly, teachers fail to have a deep understanding of thinking quality and pay sufficient attention. The teacher seldom sets questions or activities to promote the development of students’ logical, critical and innovative thinking. In addition, there are no specific ideas on how to combine reading with developing thinking quality. Last but not least, teachers ignore the cultivation of students’ interest in reading, do not involve the cultural background and humanistic knowledge behind, only limited to textbooks. Thus, for a long time, students’ language ability has not been exercised, which leads to students’ lack of motivation and interest in reading.
The interview results show that most students hold a positive attitude towards anchored instruction model. Most students said that in the anchored teaching model, their learning motivation can be stimulated in real situations. Teachers create interesting situations to let students understand the new knowledge, stimulate students’ interest, introduce the main topic of the lesson. In the independent learning section, students will have a deeper understanding of different traditional cultural forms after reading the articles and completing the table. Teachers’ questions can concrete students abstract thinking and know from which aspects they can feel the beauty of traditional culture. In the cooperative learning process, students can discuss seriously and actively choose appropriate English vocabulary. Students’ communication ability can be enhanced, and solving problems together with peers can also increase students’ sense of community. Effect evaluation, in line with the design concept of integration of teaching evaluation, students can positively evaluate peers’ performance according to the checklist. Therefore, the application of anchored teaching mode can stimulate students’ interest in English reading.
4.3. Analysis of the Results of the Classroom Observation
Through anchored teaching, students learn that the correct way to solve a reading problem first is to infer the general idea of the passage from the title or the picture. Then, through the key sentences, they should grasp the general idea of the article. Finally, students have the capacity to use context and relevant background knowledge to guess the meaning of words and understand sentences. In this way, when choosing the structure of the text and summarizing the general idea of the paragraph independently, students do not scratch their heads but complete the task quickly and smoothly according to the tips given by the teacher. In addition, in the group discussion, students discuss actively and passionately, and their own views are improved and supplemented by sharing various viewpoints. Meanwhile, in the process of peer communication and discussion, their logical thinking ability is fully trained, and they learn from each other’s strengths and make progress together. In the demonstration session, the students would shout “one, two, three, action” together. Compared with the original dull class, the students are more active and enthusiastic with high participation. Besides, students are asked to evaluate the performance of other students according to the checklist, which is more novel than the original teacher-led assessment. The process of students’ evaluation is also the process of testing their own knowledge. Students will listen to others more carefully and correct their mistakes.
Based on the scaffolding help provided by the teacher, students can draw a rough mind map. After that, the teacher continues to refine the article, gives suggestions to students by asking questions, and then asks students to enrich the mind map and table. These steps are in line with the cognitive characteristics of students and the requirements of Bloom’s cognitive goal theory. From students’ point of view, the process of improving their mind map also stimulates their sense of accomplishment. Through observing students’ classroom performance, they were more active and braver in speaking and answering teacher’s questions compared with the traditional classroom teaching which mainly focused on mechanical reading and writing.
5. Conclusions
Based on the theory of constructivism, this research aims to explore how to improve students’ interest in English reading and English reading scores through anchored teaching. In the essay, the author describes the research background, literature review, research procedure, specific teaching case and analysis of the questionnaire, interviews, classroom observation. The experimental results show that the anchored teaching mode can improve the reading class teaching, arouse students’ learning enthusiasm, and improve the English reading scores. In addition to its advantages, this teaching model also has its limitations.
The anchored teaching model applied to English reading teaching can improve students’ reading scores. The study found that anchored teaching mode pays more attention to training students’ autonomous learning abilities than the regular English reading teaching method. More importantly, anchored teaching broadens students’ horizons and deepens their understanding of Chinese and Western cultures. All of these do prove a boon to improve students’ critical thinking ability.
However, based on the current situation, in the undergraduate stage, as college students, it is extremely difficult for us to use experiments to verify how to improve students’ thinking quality on the basis of reliability. Such quantitative research needs some technical experiment support. Therefore, this essay mainly adopts knowledge research, through questionnaires and interviews, to understand teachers’ comments on students’ thinking quality and students’ own views. Despite the above limitations, this essay may have some new insights into the thinking quality, which can help to inject some enlightening ideas into the academic world or other areas of education, so that others can learn and benefit from them.
Acknowledgments
My sincere gratitude goes first to my supervisor, ShenYang, for her inspiring guidance and timely criticism. Her profound knowledge and deep insight has enlightened me a lot. She went over the manuscript for many times and offered me a lot of valuable and detailed advice. Without her patient instruction and expert guidance, the essay would not have been smoothly completed.
Appendix
