A Study on Junior High School English Big-unit Teaching Design from the Perspective of Backward Design — A Case Study of Unit 5, Grade 8 Volume 1 (People’s Education Press Edition)

Abstract

The Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition) explicitly advocates competency-oriented holistic big-unit teaching and strives to implement the integration of teaching, learning and assessment. At present, junior high school English teaching is commonly plagued by fragmented teaching design, rigid teaching logic, and delayed and disconnected assessment, which makes it difficult to effectively cultivate students’ core competencies. Adopting backward thinking, the backward design for big-unit teaching starts from the expected unit-learning outcomes and designs all learning activities around such outcomes. Promoting big-unit teaching with backward design helps overcome the drawbacks of conventional forward-oriented teaching by setting goals as the orientation and putting assessment in the first place. Combined with teaching cases, this paper elaborates the teaching path of backward design based big-unit teaching for junior high school English. It also analyzes how to conduct junior high school English teaching design under the concept of big-unit teaching from three dimensions: identifying expected learning outcomes, determining assessment evidence in advance, and planning instructional activities, so as to offer new insights for realizing the integration of “teaching-learning-assessment”.