This unit is taken from the textbook for the eighth grade that is published by the People’s Educational Press. It’s the third unit of this textbook. The content takes “doing chores at home” as the topic to train students to make polite requests and ask for permission, focusing on the English sentence pattern “Could you please…?”. Based on this context, students will use this sentence pattern to do some practice. The new sentence pattern will be the teaching focus and potential difficulty for the students. In this unit, the first reading passage is a conversation between a mother and her son, which mainly tells the story that the son didn’t want to do the chores at the beginning, but later, he volunteered to help his mother with the chores. There are two letters in the second reading passage, which mainly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of students doing chores at home. By reading these articles, students can get some new words and know some new attitudes of these authors. The content is close to students’ daily life, so students have strong interests in learning this unit. After learning this unit, students can correctly use the sentence pattern to make polite requests and ask for permission. Students can also set up the right awareness that they can understand their parents’ hard work and establish a sense of responsibility to help their parents to do the chores at home.
二、学习者特征分析
Students have accumulated some English knowledge, such as words, sentence patterns and grammar knowledge and cultivated a certain ability of English learning,when they step in the second semester of the eighth grade, which are the advantages of students for English learning. But there are also some disadvantages. First of all, this period is at the beginning of this semester, some students are still in a relaxed state, so they can’t devote themselves to their studies. Secondly, the learning and cognitive level of the students has been polarizing. Excellent students can study well with the teacher and complete the learning tasks of this unit. But the students who have difficulties in learning are unable to grasp new knowledge in time. Based on this situation, on one hand, teacher should select topics closed to daily life to stimulate students’ interests in learning English. On the other hand, teacher should use different teaching methods flexibly and set learning tasks of varying difficulties according to the learning abilities of different students.