A Case Study Of Blended Learning In EFL Reading Class At The Primary Level

Reading plays an important role in foreign language learning.The "English Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education(2011)" of our country sets high requirements for students' English reading ability,as well as the English reading literacy framework for middle and primary school students proposed by some scholars in recent years.Restricted by some undesirable conditions,the current English reading education in primary school is not satisfactory.Supported by information technology,the pedagogical approach of blended learning could be a novel and promising way out.Blended learning incorporates both the advantages of traditional classroom teaching and the advantages of information technology.It is also a method that integrates student-centered education and teacher-guiding education.This study innovatively applied blended learning in teaching English reading at the primary level,aiming at improving the reading literacy of China's primary school students and exploring an appropriate blended learning model of teaching English reading from the perspectives of both the students and the teacher.In this study,the author designed a holistic teaching plan,combining online and offline reading activities,took full advantage of the local online teaching platforms to collecte and release learning materials,explored multiple ways of learning,integrated the experiments with classroom teaching,and taught reading in a systematic style.During the experiments,two natural classes of Grade Six students from K Primary School in Suzhou Industrial Park were selected as participants,of which one was treated as the experimental class while the other the control class.The experimental class learned English reading in a blended way,which means they had face-to-face reading activities in class and in the mean time learned other online materials at home independently under the organization,guidance and supervision of the teacher.The control class only did sustained silent reading in class without other blended learning activities.The experiment continued for one term.Before and after the experiments,the author adopted the Informal Decoding Inventory,the questionnaire of English reading attitudes and habits,the questionnaire of students'opinions about blended learning,interviews and teaching observation journnal to collect data,and did statistical analysis with softwares such as Excel and SPSS.The results of the experiment showed that:1)blended learning has a positive effect on improving the primary students' English decoding ability,with about 87.5%of participants improving at their decoding ability;2)blended learning has a positive effect on improving the primary students' English reading attitudes and habits,with about 86%of participants expressing wills to read autonomously or making reading plans,higher than the number before the experiments;3)primary school students hold positive opinions about blended leaning,with 61%of participants expressing their preference to learning reading in a blended way and 53%of parcipants thinking it more helpful to have reading activities in a blended way than purely online or offline;4)proper and sufficient instructions from the teacher can facilitate primary school students' progress in blended learning,including the collection and integration of online and offline learning materials before teaching,the guidance,enlightment and supervision during teaching,and seeking parents' cooperation through active communication.Based on the above results,this thesis proposed some tentative advice on how to apply a blended learning model in the English reading curriculum design and how to grasp teacher's roles in blended learning,hoping to help improve the English reading education at the primary level...