An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Reading Aloud On Students’ Self-efficacy And English Academic Achievement

Reading aloud is a traditional teaching method,but has been ignored by most of the high school teachers and students because of the present evaluation system.Not only can reading aloud help change students’ habit of valuing written English more than verbal English,but also it can stimulate students’ English study interest and self-confidence,which will definitely improve students English grades.This study is based on a specific theoretical basis,and comprehensively uses Bandura’s "self-efficacy" and reading-learning promotion mechanism theory to conduct an in-depth study of how to give a full play to reading aloud."Self-efficiency" is a concept put forward by Bandura in the 1970s and 1980s.It refers to the potential motivating factors in the learner’s learning process to promote or assist the learner in accomplishing certain tasks.Self-efficacy is believed to regulate human behavior through cognition,drive,emotion,and decision-making processes.Research at home and abroad show that self-efficacy plays a very important role in self-regulated learning,and there is an inseparable link between students’ self-efficacy and their actual achievements.In addition,it guides students to actively attribute learning objectives with moderate difficulty and to cultivate and inspire high school students’ English learning.Reading aloud is a conscious and purposeful voiced language expression activity.It is also a cognitive psychological process with complex psychological and physiological changes.Based on the perception and understanding of language,readers use imagination to generate emotions,which in turn results in the need to read aloud and provide a powerful drive for English learning.Many scholars believe that reading aloud can enable students to continuously strengthen their consolidation and accumulation of tacit knowledge such as vocabulary and sentence patterns,and gradually develop a sense of language.With a strong sense of language,learning a foreign language becomes easy and simple,which can increase the learners’ confidence and interest in learning English.This article is based on the above theories,and integrates domestic and international empirical researches on reading,trying to prove that reading aloud can not only improve the level of brain response and consolidate vocabulary memory,but it can also change the situation in which students are having difficulty in talking and to improve students’ English learning.Interest and self-efficacy.This article mainly uses experiment together with instruments such as questionnaires,interviews to find out the relationship between English reading aloud and the self-efficacy of senior high school students and their academic performance.In the experiment,two classes of students are selected from grade two in Xianning high school.One class is selected as the experimental class and the other as the control class.The experimental class receives a reading-aloud training while the control class does not receive such training.The experiment lased about four months.Based on the theoretical study of learning self-efficacy,relying on the English discipline,the author explores the impact of reading training on seniors’ English self-efficacy,and validates the effectiveness of reading aloud through the different training results between experimental class and control class.Through the study of the results of the experiment,the author found the following findings:First,by carrying out systematic reading training,it can help improve the self-efficacy of students’ English learning.Students,trained systematically through reading aloud,improved their reading habits,their pronunciation and intonation,their speaking ability,their sense of self-efficacy,and their English learning.Second,those students who are often encouraged and praised by the teachers are more envious of and affirmative of their classmates.The positive and negative evaluations of their peers and others will also greatly influence the formation and retention of English learning self-efficacy.Third,the successful reading experience can enhance students’ recognition of their own abilities and improve their self-efficacy in English learning.Fourth,they can guide students to make positive attributions,to attribute the improvement of their performance to the formation of reading habits,to develop their sense of language,and other internal abilities and efforts.Factors such as these are conducive to enhancing students’ self-efficacy.These findings prove that reading aloud can indeed improve students’ academic self-efficacy in English.Self-efficacy can directly affect academic performance in English.The feasibility and necessity of implementing English reading in ordinary high schools should be promoted.