However, the realities of education have not lived up to these ideals. In much of the world, education still follows an industrial model in which students enter the educational assembly line in a cohort usually based on age, collectively go through educational “processing” one step at a time, and then receive the quality control of tests and certifications, before eventually entering the market of jobs. For example, in China, even with the educational reform going on for several years, the application of the personalized teaching seems to be in a developing dilemma. Take junior high school in China for instance; few schools apply what educators call personalized teaching in class. And the classroom remains teacher-centered. As a result, the subjectivity of students is neglected, which leads to the general lack of the enthusiasm in English learning.

What should be known to people all is that, based on the Big Data era, personalized learning and teaching can surely make more progress. With the help of updated application, the potential of personalized learning and teaching can be tapped much fuller. In this study, teaching method for personalized English reading in junior high school in China will be taken as the representative of personalized English teaching to be discussed, which when mentioned, is always connected to hierarchical teaching study.

1.2 Meaning and Purpose

1.2.1 Meaning

There is a growing consensus that prevalent teaching model, which aims at utilitarian purposes and neglects students’ differences, has its problems. 1) One of the problems is its internal validity, to borrow a term from researchers. Standardized curriculum falls short of what inpiduals and the society at large need. The model also has a reliability problem. Children do not learn alike. Grouping them simply by age, and force them to learn at the same group pace will bore some to tears and challenge others to fears. Seat time is no longer much of a predictor of success. The same seat time yields drastically different results. Solutions for these problems are sporadic and anecdotal, waiting to be discovered, analyzed and implemented or repurposed for use on a larger scale. 2) Pedagogical innovations also converge to make advances in personalized learning possible. Flipped classroom is now widely accepted, leading to greater flexibility among students. Project and problem-based learning are on the rise. Competency-based learning is gaining momentum. All of these are already causing changes in the presentation of educational content, the pathways to learning and the assessment of learning. 3) There is also an aspect of social equality to the idea of personalized learning. Affluent families can buy their way into customized teaching for their children, while regular folks have to accept what they can access in the public system, hence the moral imperative to work on personalized learning. In the public system, teacher and other educational resources are scarce, compromising effort to customize education based on personal differences. Small classes end up as the second-best choices. Even that is hard to achieve. Education is a subsystem in the larger social Eco-system. In China, the shrinking pool of students due to one-child policies in the past few decades have led to decisions to close rural schools with low enrollment, while the remaining schools absorbed the displaced students, leading to even larger classes, especially in less developed areas where educational resources are scarce .

According to the studies, personalized teaching can do students lots of benefits : 1) it can enhance the participation of the students in class; 2) it can improve the learning interest in English and as well as the confidence of students so as to encourage them to study; 3) it can improve the practice ability of the students to some extent. Besides, personalized English reading as a major element of personalized English teaching will be a great help to the application of hierarchical teaching. By applying personalized English reading methods in class, teachers, based on the different learning situations of different students, make targeting studying plans for inpidual student, can fully activate the studying subjectivity among the students and as well as improve their learning efficiency.