A Survey Of Grade Seven Students’ Cognitive Load In English Reading Classes

Reading comprehension is one of the most important abilities that students should learn in an English class.Teachers and students,especially those in Grade 7,must give extra value and attention to this valuable skill.As English learning advances,the learning goals will also undergo a more demanding change.This change is evident among the students of the Grade 7 English reading classes,with varying reading comprehension levels because of the differences in their cognitive load.Therefore,in the first year of junior middle school,teachers should design logical and systematic teaching activities catering to the students’ cognitive load.Otherwise,their subsequent English learning will be affected by fear and this will reduce the English learning effect.To optimize the teaching design and the distribution of students’ cognition in classes,John Sweller proposed the cognitive load theory in 1988,which attempts to encourage students to efficaciously utilize their residual cognitive resources to achieve the optimal outcomes of classroom learning.For this reason,the theory can adequately explain the causes of unfavorable effects of English reading classes for Grade 7 students,as well as enhance the efficiency and effect of English teaching.The thesis uses questionnaires and interviews to conduct surveys on all 150 Grade 7 students and two Grade 7 English teachers in a school.Additionally,a single group pre-test and post-test experiment is carried out,with the sample involving 77 students from two classes in Grade 7 of the identical school.The fundamental purpose of using above research instruments is to cope with the following three questions: 1)What is the status quo of Grade 7 students’ cognitive load in English reading classes?2)What are reasons for Grade 7 students’ high cognitive load in the English reading classes? 3)Can the reading content presented in an integrated format based on cognitive load theory,compared to the conventional methods,promote students’ reading comprehension enormously?First,the research results suggest that the students’ extraneous cognitive load ranks the highest among the three types of cognitive loads in Grade 7 English reading classes.Furthermore,there is an uneven distribution among different sorts of cognitive loads during the three instructional stages of reading classes.The extraneous cognitive load is the highest at the pre-reading stages.At the while-reading stages,all three cognitive loads are relatively high,among which the extraneous cognitive load is the highest.At the post-reading stages,the intrinsic and extraneous cognitive loads are both low,but the germane cognitive load is not high either.Possible reasons for the situation could be: First,teachers allocate time at the pre-reading stages unreasonably,and the planned activities are improper in consideration of their poor understanding of the students’ existing knowledge and experience.Second,during the while-reading stage,owing to teachers’ negligence of the blackboard design,their presentations and teaching content tend to be illogical and incoherent.Third,at the post-reading stages,exercises of language points are paid too much attention,which formalizes post-reading activities.Next,the results of the experiment highlight that if reading materials are presented in the integrated format based on cognitive load theory instead of the conventional format,students’ performance in reading comprehension could be remarkably enhanced.Lastly,the thesis provides suggestions on optimizing Grade 7 English reading classes through effectual time allocation and systematized teaching content presentation and so on.