An Empirical Study On The Application Of“Reading Circles”Model To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading is both necessary part of language learning and an important way of language input.In the current English teaching in senior high school,however,most English teachers adopt the traditional teaching mode in reading teaching,taking the dominate role and explaining in details.Students lack active participation and often passively complete the reading tasks designed by teachers,leading to students’ low interest in English reading and poor English reading ability which needs to be improved.So,how to change the current situation of English reading teaching in senior high school and improve the teaching effect has become an urgent problem for teachers to solve.The "Reading Circles" mode is different from the traditional teaching mode,which has attracted the attention of educational and teaching researchers at home and abroad.Foreign research is gradually mature,but it is still in its infancy in China.Using the extracurricular reading materials and practice both in class and out of class,the author tries to explore whether the application of “Reading Circles” mode is helpful to improve the students’ interest in English reading,their ability of English reading comprehension and their cooperative learning ability.This is significant for the perfection of "Reading Circles" theory.In addition,it is also of certain reference significance for the later research of others.Based on Harvey’s "Reading Circles" theory,constructivism learning theory,cooperative learning theory and autonomous learning theory,the author selected 90 students from two parallel classes of Grade 2 in Shaowu No.1 Middle School of Fujian Province as the subjects and conducted an empirical research for ten months.There are 46 students in the experimental class and 44 students in the control class.This study aims to answer the following three questions: 1)Does the application of the "Reading Circles" model to English reading teaching in senior high school help to stimulate students’ interest in English reading? If so,is the effect obvious? 2)Does the application of the "Reading Circles" model to English reading teaching in senior highschool contribute to the improvement of students’ ability of reading comprehension? If so,is the effect obvious? And which specific reading ability of reading comprehension has been improved significantly? 3)Does the application of "Reading Circles" mode to English reading teaching in senior high school contribute to the improvement of students’ cooperative learning ability? If so,is the effect obvious? And which specific cooperative learning ability of the students has been improved significantly?Before and after the teaching experiment,the author conducted a questionnaire survey and a reading comprehension test respectively in the experimental class and the control class.Meanwhile,10 students were randomly selected from the experimental class for interviews.After the experiment,the results of the questionnaire survey,the reading tests scores and the interview were analyzed by SPSS 23.The results show that:1)The application of "Reading Circles" mode to English reading teaching in senior high school can obviously stimulate students’ interest in their English reading;2)The application of "Reading Circles" mode to English reading teaching in senior high school is beneficial to the improvement of students’ ability of reading comprehension ability,and the effect is obvious.In terms of students’ specific ability of reading comprehension,their ability to summarize the main idea,guess the meaning of words and make judgments are more significantly improved.3)The application of "Reading Circles" mode to English reading teaching in senior high school is conducive to the improvement of students’ cooperative learning ability.In particular,the improvement of students’ cooperative consciousness is the most obvious.However,there are some limitations in this study,such as short experimental time,the changes in the number of experimental samples and subjective factors.At last,the author states the revelation of this study on English teaching in senior high schools,and puts forward some suggestions on the future study of the "Reading Circles" mode.