A Comprehension-oriented Research On The Application Of Backward Design To Teaching English Reading In Junior High Schools

Understanding is an important goal of teaching to pursue.The meaning of instructional design is giving priority to understanding and achieving understanding.However,in the current classroom teaching,it is a common occurrence that some of the classroom activities lack and ignore the understanding,even hinder it.In many classes,teachers hold the views that teaching means the presentation of teaching materials to students successively,and they neither need to reintegrate the teaching materials nor need to take students' cognitive needs into account.They think what students need to do is receiving and processing information efficiently,which actually has nothing to do with understanding.In order to realize the goal of understanding efficiently,comprehension-oriented teaching advocates backward design which begins with identifying desired result,then determining acceptable evidence,and finally planning learning experiences.This research aims to answer the following questions:(1)What is the current situation of students' understanding in English reading?(2)What are the differences between backward design and the traditional instructional design?(3)Can the application of backward design improve students' reading comprehension? If it can,which group of students will make the greatest progress?The research lasts for one semester in four months.Through questionnaires,the author has a good knowledge of the current situation of junior high school students' level in reading comprehension.Then the author carries out a backward design experiment.The research subjects are from two parallel classes of Grade Eight of Dongjie School in Xinjiang County,Yuncheng City,Shanxi Province.The author adopts backward design in the teaching of reading in the experimental class while the traditional instructional design in the control class.In order to control and overcome the interference of irrelevant variables,the teacher and reading materials are same for two classes.The data of pre-test and post-test on reading areanalyzed quantitatively by SPSS 17.0 to test the effectiveness of backward design in reading.The author also makes an analysis of instructional designs of the same period and the relevant data are collected from English teachers in this junior high school to find out the differences between backward design and the traditional instructional design.In addition,interviews are conducted to further prove the effectiveness of backward design.Major findings of this research are as follows:(1)The overall current situation of junior high school students' reading comprehension is relatively satisfactory.Understanding in the following facets: explanation,interpretation,application and self-knowledge are acceptable.While understanding ability of perspective and empathy is not so satisfactory.However,these two facets of understanding(perspective and empathy)have improved a lot after the application of backward design in reading,which was proved in the interviews.(2)Backward design is different from the traditional instructional design in instructional objectives and teaching procedures.(3)Backward design on the theory of comprehension-oriented teaching can efficiently improve students' overall and each facet of understanding,and it is more effective in medium-score group and high-score group.There are many limitations for this research: the type of samples selected for this study lacks representativeness since all of the participants of the questionnaire were chosen from the same school.Questionnaire,reading tests and interview were adopted to collect the data,and these research instruments are not enough to test the effectiveness of backward design in the teaching of English reading;findings and implications of this study are not deep enough due to the author's limited academic research capability;and the experiment lasts only one semester which is not longer enough to test the effectiveness of backward design.However,the research plays an important role in promoting the study of backward design in subject of English teaching and the thesis also provides some pedagogical suggestions for the further studies of the backward design.