How to improve the teaching methods of high school English

With the gradual improvement of the requirements for students' English proficiency in the new century, higher requirements have been put forward for high school English teaching. At the same time, the community's call for reform of English teaching is also getting higher and higher. Thus, how to grasp the high school English teaching, what kind of teaching methods should be used to improve the quality of teaching, and cultivate qualified talents needed by the society, has become a major topic facing high school English teaching. 1. The Present Situation and Needs of English Teaching in High Schools The purpose of English teaching in high schools is to teach learners the knowledge of the English language as well as to cultivate their ability to use the language. By analyzing the current situation of English teaching, at present, high school English teaching mainly focuses on the cultivation of students' listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. These aspects all bear the tasks of imparting language knowledge and training students to use language skills to varying degrees. Taking reading as an example, although most teachers have now adopted the idea of organizing teaching with the learner as the main body, in the real teaching practice, the traditional teaching methods are still dominated, i.e., in-depth explanation of words and sentences, careful analysis of grammatical structures, and then translation of the text sentence by sentence. Students, however, have no or little opportunity to participate in the classroom teaching time gained. As a result, the teacher speaks with exhaustion and the students listen with boredom and helplessness in a class, so that English teaching becomes a complete study of language rather than focusing on learning as a communication tool. In the process of teaching and learning, there are many contents that can be mastered through students' independent learning, and some problems can be solved through independent thinking, but because teachers do not believe in students' learning ability, and speak too much and analyze too much, students lose the opportunity to exercise. This is actually a manifestation of emphasizing knowledge over ability. Another reality is that the limited number of teaching hours has been difficult to meet the requirements of teaching content, resulting in teachers are often busy to catch up with the teaching schedule, and to catch up with the teaching schedule itself is impossible to take into account the cultivation of students' practical language skills.

With the deep development of China's economic construction, society has put forward higher requirements for students' English proficiency. Despite the fact that many students can achieve better English test results in the college entrance examination, their ability to use English, especially the ability to express themselves orally, is still lacking, which is certainly due to the students' own reasons, but it can't be said that it has nothing to do with the teaching of English in high school. With the obvious increase in the demand for students' ability to use language, we can't help but consider the changing needs of teaching and learning, and our teaching materials and lesson types should be improved and adjusted in a timely manner.

2. Ideas for the Reform of High School English Teaching

"The essence of a language is its actual function. To know a language is not only to know how to pronounce it and how to make sentences, but also to know what kind of words to use in what situation." High school English teaching should help students lay a solid language foundation and develop their language application skills. This requires that our teaching activities should not only be conducive to basic language training, but also to the cultivation of communicative competence; not only should we pay attention to language training at the sentence level, but also gradually develop a grasp of the text as a whole as well as practical communicative competence. From this goal, language teaching not only requires students to master language knowledge, but more importantly, to cultivate students' ability to use the language in practice, i.e. communicative competence. People's communicative ability is carried out in conversations, and language learning must also be organized and taught in conversations. From this point of view, from this point of view, the organic combination of traditional language teaching and application-based teaching should be an advanced, effective and reasonable teaching mode for high school English teaching. It is because the traditional language teaching method facilitates students' solid mastery of the basic knowledge of the language, develops their grammatical analysis ability and enhances their language proficiency. And the application-based teaching method can cultivate students' ability to analyze, generalize, synthesize and infer problems. Whether it is articulation analysis or meaning coherent reasoning, it can mobilize students' ability to think positively, make students get rid of the constraints of grammatical analysis and grasp the overall meaning of the article. At the same time, the application-based teaching method is conducive to the creation of a harmonious, natural language environment, so that students are immersed in the use of language in the environment,

Maximum participation in the teaching and learning activities, the formation of a new teacher-student interaction of the teaching atmosphere, so that the students of the language skills of the natural development of the ability to carry out the actual communication ability.

The task of high school English teaching, on the one hand, is to train students in listening, speaking, reading and writing several skills on the basis of their mastery of a certain knowledge of English. We want to reform the current high school English in the unsatisfactory passive situation, only to grasp the reading teaching is not enough to comprehensively improve students' listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, so that students can play a good "wide, thick, firm" foundation, but also from the following aspects of the start to improve:

(1) to strengthen the importance of oral teaching for many years, and to strengthen the teaching and learning of the English language in high school. Over the years, hearing training in high school teaching is actually listening training, oral teaching for various reasons have not been given enough attention. Nowadays, the demand for students in higher education has changed significantly compared to the past, especially the requirement for speaking and listening in English has increased dramatically. We must adjust our teaching accordingly with this demand. At present, most of the textbooks and curricula emphasize the transfer of knowledge and give less consideration to the application of knowledge. Practice has proved that it is essential to cultivate students' ability to use language. In view of this line of thought, English teaching in senior secondary schools should pay more attention to oral teaching and take listening and speaking as separate lessons. Listening teaching is not subject to the constraints of oral teaching, which is broader in content and more comprehensive in subject matter, and the speed can be accelerated; whereas oral teaching should be characterized by its strong relevance, which is more conducive to the development of communicative competence. In this way, the practical and applied courses of English teaching in high school not only have a certain guarantee on the number of teaching hours, but also after the end of the basic English teaching, students can also invest their own energy and time to contact speaking and listening.

(2) Improve the oral examination and make it more and more standardized The inclusion of the oral examination in the testing of English courses is on the one hand a test of students' oral skills, and on the other hand, it can promote the improvement of students' ability to express themselves orally. The practice of teaching in high school tells us that students pay attention to whatever schools and teachers emphasize, and the emphasis on speaking skills is in line with the current needs of English teaching. The guiding role of the examination is very important, so we should gradually standardize the content of the examination and the examination mark, strict examination discipline, so that it is increasingly standardized and reasonable.

(3) through the classroom questioning to stimulate students' interest in learning Classroom questioning is the most commonly used method in teaching, questioning is not only expressed as a specific problem, can be extended to the teacher said in order to trigger the students' verbal question and answer any words. Teacher-student classroom communication is not only the form of a question and answer, but also a kind of exchange of ideas and heart, so classroom questions need to be fully prepared and designed in the preparation process. Teachers carefully consider how to make students interested in the question and actively participate, and ultimately achieve the purpose of practicing language and stimulate thinking, but also consider how to communicate with students in the heart.

(4) Examining the Effectiveness of Classroom Questioning Classroom questioning occurs throughout the entire classroom, and the effectiveness of classroom questioning can be demonstrated by the interaction between teachers and students. In language teaching, the purpose of questioning is to induce students to take the initiative to use language, so effective questioning is often the key to triggering students to give relevant or complete answers quickly and actively. On the contrary, questioning fails if students respond with long periods of silence, or if only a few studious students answer, or if the answers are too brief. Suggesting the effectiveness of classroom questioning is worthwhile with a little labeling.

Clarity: whether students fully understand the content of the question and the form of response expected by the teacher.

Learning value: Teachers should examine whether the questioning stimulates students to think about what they have learned, and whether the students' answers lead to the next step in the study of the subject.

Interest: whether the content of the question is interesting, challenging, and stimulating. This can be perceived from the students' expressions and verbal responses.

Accessibility: A question is not accessible if it can be answered by only a few students. For challenging questions, the teacher can get the majority of students to **** and participate by giving them a little time to think about it, or by giving them a slight hint.

Extensibility: questioning should encourage varied or extended responses. Therefore, open-ended questioning should be used wherever possible to stimulate students' thinking.

Teacher feedback: teachers should use positive reinforcement, i.e., affirmation and praise to give students a sense of achievement and motivate their interest in learning. Protecting students' self-esteem is the basis of teacher feedback.

(5) Teacher role change The teacher's awareness of his role change in the teaching process is very important. In actual teaching, teachers must pay attention to the changes in the roles of teachers and students, adjust their roles appropriately, and gradually change into a facilitator of students' language learning. Teachers should change from being managers, controllers and instructors to change agents, that is, facilitators of learning, whose use is to help students learn more and more independently and take more and more responsibility for their own learning. Teachers have the following roles:

Diagnostician: identifying the learning methods currently used by students and making them aware of them in order to improve their ability to choose and use them.

The trainer: the teacher decides on a case-by-case basis when to train the students in the content and when and in which learning tasks to develop their ability to use the knowledge they have been taught.

Trainer: the instructor who guides the students in their learning methods.

The coordinator: monitors the students' learning process, allowing for variations in the pace of learning.

Language learner: the teacher puts himself in the students' situation in order to better recognize the challenges and difficulties that the students will encounter and to know the students better.

The researcher: while teaching a foreign language, the teacher analyzes the needs of the students, develops a teaching plan and evaluates the effectiveness of the teaching.

Teachers can only guide students' learning effectively if they continue to study and research teaching theories, receive training, improve their own quality, and constantly adjust their roles. Undoubtedly, the deeper the teacher's understanding of the content and the actual requirements of language teaching, and the more he or she knows about the cognitive characteristics of the students, the more capable he or she is of transforming from the traditional instiller of knowledge to the actor of application-based language teaching.

3. Reflections on the Reform of High School English Teaching In the process of high school English teaching, the use of traditional language teaching methods combined with application-based teaching methods plays a very important role in improving students' reading ability, cultivating students' ability to analyze, generalize, synthesize and infer as well as their initial language communication skills. At the same time, the strengthening of the emphasis on the practical application ability of high school application, especially the strengthening of oral teaching, will play a positive role in reforming the current passive situation of high school English is unsatisfactory, improve the practical language application ability of students, and lay a good foundation of "wide, thick and firm". However, we find that there are still some difficulties in the reform of teaching English in high school, which need to be explored, improved and perfected continuously. First of all, using the traditional language teaching and application-based language teaching combined teaching mode, the understanding of the thematic ideas and the central content of the article, students need to have a certain basic knowledge of the language, through the understanding of the article to master, but also often depends on their understanding of the social and cultural, historical, geographic and other aspects of the Anglo-American society and depends on their cognitive structure and cognitive learning ability, so the classroom should also pay attention to the students' understanding of the English language. Therefore, attention should be paid to teaching students about British and American culture in the classroom. Secondly, cultivating students' communicative competence is also a challenge to the quality of teachers.