The Application Of Literature Circles Mode On English Extracurricular Reading In Junior Middle School

Reading as one of the most important methods of acquiring knowledge and information,has its own responsibility for spreading civilization and inheriting culture.Reading is also one of the ways for students to get English input so that it is especially important in English learning.Many scholars believe that to learn foreign language well,students need to do a lot of reading.But usually students read materials in the teachercentered class and English reading comprehension tests are often simple and short.Besides,teachers usually pay attention to the training of reading skills but ignore the amount of reading on the part of the students.In addition,students are lack of their own spare time for extracurricular reading and the systematic guidance and supervision.Thus in order to further improve students’ reading proficiency and reading interests,this research aims to apply the Literature Circles Mode to extracurricular reading for junior high school students.The Literature Circles Mode proposed by the American educator Daniels,is a student-centered group learning activity.This mode is based on the theory of cooperative learning and aims to develop students’ autonomous learning ability and improve their language competence.It is a student-centered group cooperative reading activity.In the reading mode,students are divided into different groups,and students in the same group play different roles,read cooperatively and complete related tasks.The present study tries to apply Literature Circles Mode to junior middle school English extracurricular reading and investigates its impact on improving students’ reading proficiency,stimulating their interests and improving their reading attitudes.The study aims to answer the following questions:(1)What effects does the Literature Circles Mode bring to students’ English reading proficiency?(2)What effects does the Literature Circles teaching mode have on students’ extracurricular reading?(3)What are the students’ attitudes towards the Literature Circles teaching mode?The research takes 70 students from Grade 8 in two different class of Affiliated Middle School of Henan Normal University as research subjects.Class 9 is the control class with 34 students.Class 12 is the experimental class with 36 students.The experimental class was conducted by Literature Circles Mode while the control class was conducted by traditional mode in extracurricular English reading.The experiment was carried out for a semester.Two reading tests,two questionnaires and an interview were used to collect data.And the SPSS 17.0 is used to analyze the data statistically.The conclusions are as follows.(1)The application of the Literature Circles Mode can improve students’ English reading proficiency.Based on the data collected,it can be found the post-test scores of experimental class are generally higher than that of control class.It is mainly due to students’ thinking and summary of the words and phrases in reading materials and their logical thinking ability is also improved in the reading process of the Literature Circles Mode.It helps students to understand the article better and faster in the reading test,which is beneficial to students’ English reading proficiency.(2)According to the data,the Literature Circles Mode is effective to stimulate students’ interests towards English extracurricular reading and help students have a positive reading attitude.Students are more satisfied with their reading results,and are more active in discussion,which increases their reading confidence.(3)The Literature Circles Mode provides a relaxing learning atmosphere for students and offer sufficient opportunities for them to share information and communicate with each other.And some students find it also cultivates their independent thinking ability,improves their autonomous learning ability,enhances their self-confidence and improves their sense of cooperation.