A Study On The Application Of DRTA Method To English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

English reading teaching has always been regarded as a significant part of English teaching in junior high school.Students can obtain information and language knowledge through reading texts,and get considerable language input.Meanwhile,they can also constantly improve their thinking ability by combining the acquired with their own thinking after reading.In the current English teaching in junior high school,however,most teachers pay more attention to students’ superficial comprehension of the reading texts,caring more about whether students can master the language points and grammatical points in the text and whether students can find the answers to the reading questions.So they neglect to train their students how to understand the texts,and how to evaluate and analyze them after comprehension.English Curriculum Standard(Ministry of Education,2011)for compulsory education period points out: Reading teaching in the stage of junior high school is an important source of knowledge for students.During reading teaching,teachers should pay more attention to cultivating students to acquire such reading abilities as how to make speculation and prediction based on the given information while reading,how to find out the ideas that the authors want to convey,and how to analyze and evaluate the authors’ ideas.In fact,this requires that teachers put students in the centrality of classroom reading teaching,in order to develop students’ abilities of reading comprehension and critical reading thinking through their guidance of teaching.Therefore,the author tries to apply DRTA teaching method to English reading teaching in junior high school in order to answer the following two questions:1)Does the application of DRTA teaching method to English reading teaching in junior high school contribute to the improvement of students’ ability of reading comprehension? If so,is the effect significant?2)Does the application of DRAT teaching method in English reading teaching in junior high school help to promote the students’ use of critical reading strategies? If so,which strategy is utilized more frequently?The author conducted a three-month empirical study.The selected experimentalsubjects are students from two classes taught by the author in Grade 9 in No.18 Middle School in Yining.The students from these two classes have fairly similar reading level and have a certain reading foundation.Class 4 of Grade 9 is the experimental class while Class 10 of Grade 9 is the control class.While teaching the experimental class,the author applied DRTA teaching method to reading teaching,training students to use critical reading strategies.The students first make the most basic prediction of the reading texts under the instruction of the teacher,and then make a deeper reading comprehension and thinking by using the six kinds of critical reading strategies:prediction,annotation,overview,summary,inventory,and analysis and evaluation.Before and after the experiment,the author collected data by using reading tests and questionnaires and then analyzed it through SPSS24.0.After the experiment,10 students from the experimental class were also randomly selected for one-to-one interview.The research results indicate that: 1)The application of DRTA teaching method to English reading teaching in junior high school contributes to the improvement of students’ reading comprehension ability,and the effect is significant.2)The application of DRTA teaching method to English reading teaching in junior high school is helpful to promote the students to use critical reading strategies,and the effect is significant.It is found that the strategies of previewing,summarizing and analyzing and evaluating are used by students most significantly.At last,the author expounds the limitations as well as the enlightenment of the research,and puts forward some corresponding suggestions for future correlation researches.