An Empirical Study Of ESA Teaching Model In English Reading Teaching Of Senior High School

Reading is not only an important means of foreign language learning,but also one of the important goals of foreign language teaching.Therefore,English reading occupies a large proportion in the whole senior high school English teaching.Although both teachers and students attach great importance to reading,the teaching effect of reading is not satisfactory.Teachers usually explain words first,then focus on difficult sentences and then on text reading.Teachers often pay attention to the explanation of knowledge points,train students’ language knowledge,and neglect the cultivation of students’ reading interest and reading ability,resulting in students passively completing the reading tasks given by teachers,lacking interest in reading,reading ability can not be improved.This is due to the monotony and predictability of the current English reading teaching model in senior high schools.In view of this phenomenon,this paper applies the E(Engage)-S(Study)-A(Activate)teaching model to senior high school English reading teaching,with a view to helping senior high school students with English reading.British educator Harmer(1998)first put forward ESA teaching model in his book How to Teach English,pointing out that there are three basic elements in English classroom teaching: Engage,Study and Activate.At the same time,he also explained the reason why ESA teaching model is superior to other teaching models: the flexible and changeable reading teaching model.Through ingenious transformation and combination of the three basic elements of Engage,Study and Activate,three different types of lesson sequences are formed: Straight Arrows sequence,Boomerang sequence and Patchwork sequence.That is to say,teachers do not adhere to the traditional teaching model in teaching process,according to the characteristics of students and teaching content,flexibly design a reading teaching model suitable for students’ characteristics,so as to achieve the best reading teaching effect.Therefore,in order to solve the problems of reading teaching in practice,the author tries to apply ESA teaching model to English reading teaching practice to verify its effectiveness.In this study,a total of 108 students from Class A in Grade One of XX High School were selected as experimental class(54 students)and Class B as control class(54 students).The research includes two questions: 1)Can ESA teaching model enhance students’ interest in reading? 2)Can ESA teaching model improve students’ English reading performance? During the experiment,the control class adopted the traditional teaching method,and the experimental class implemented Harmer’ s ESA teaching model,strictly controlling other variables.At the end of the experiment,questionnaires,pre-test and post-test scores were collected and analyzed using SPSS21.0 software.The experiment data show that,compared with the control class,the experimental class has a significant improvement in reading interest and performance.Therefore,it can be concluded that ESA teaching model can effectively enhance students’ interest and reading performance in English reading.