Action Research On Narrative Approach In Junior Middle School English Reading Teaching

As one of the basic language skills,reading plays a crucial role in English teaching.According to the investigation,there is still a gap between the present reading teaching situation in junior middle schools and the requirements of the national English curriculum.The following problems extensively exist in reading teaching: Many students are poor in English reading;They are not interested in English reading learning;The classroom atmosphere is always depressing.How to improve such teaching situation becomes a big challenge for English teachers.Narrative Approach(NA)advocates that a certain teaching process and the textbook should be designed and presented in the form of narrative,making students learn language in a real situation constructed through narration.Since NA was proposed,researchers tried to apply it to different kinds of English classes.Most of the previous studies were carried out in college.And the previous studies on the application of NA in middle school English teaching mainly focused on vocabulary teaching.This research tries to apply NA to English reading teaching in junior middle school in order to improve students’ ability and their interest in reading.The following three questions will be answered in this research:1.In what aspects does Narrative Approach affect students’ English reading learning?2.What problems would be encountered in the application of Narrative Approach to English reading teaching?3.How can the problems be solved to make Narrative Approach more effective?Fifty-two students of Grade Eight were chosen as research participants.They came from an ordinary class of a junior middle school in Taishan,Guangdong Province.The research lasted for four months,from September to December in 2018.There were totally two rounds of research.During the first round,six kinds of narrative learning activities were designed for English reading teaching according to NA.The second round of research was conducted in order to solve the problems which were founded in the first round.Some adjustments were made to the six narrative learning activities.And then they were applied to the reading teaching again.At the end of the research,students’ reading scores were analyzed by SPSS 24.0.A questionnaire and an interview for students were conducted in order to know more about students’ attitudes toward NA.The results show that NA is an effective teaching method to improve junior middle school students’ English reading comprehension scores,reading interest,and deepen their understanding of the passages.And it also has positive impact on the improvement of the classroom atmosphere,vocabulary learning as well as students’ confidence in English learning.However,some activities such as making English news report and interviewing are a little bit difficult for students.Teachers should provide students with enough assistance and encouragement so as to reach the best teaching result.Some pedagogical implications are offered in this research.First,reading learning interest should be improved in order to achieve the improvement of reading scores.Second,narrative learning activities should be designed according to students’ competence and interest.Third,students should be the creator of learning situation,which can develop their abilities of imagination and creation.