An Experimental Study On Content-based Instruction In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

As a comprehension skill,reading plays an important role in English teaching in senior high school.However,there are still some problems in English reading teaching in senior high school,such as paying too much attention to form,neglecting text content,and so on.This requires scholars to continue to explore and find better teaching methods or models which are suitable for senior high English reading teaching in China.Content-based Instruction,as a language teaching model,builds language teaching on a certain subject or subject matter,and combines language learning with subject knowledge learning,which can improve students’ subject knowledge and cognitive ability as well as their language proficiency.Many scholars have carried out empirical studies to prove that Content-based Instruction can play a positive role in second language learning.However,most of the studies take college students as research subjects,and generally focus on students’ comprehensive language ability.There is lacking in research on reading subskills.Combined with Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Swain’s Output Hypothesis,and Hymes’ s Communicative Competence,this study aims to apply Content-based Instruction to the teaching of English reading in senior high school,to explore its influence on three advanced reading subskills: speculating on the author’s view and attitude,understanding the main idea,and inferring the meaning of words.In this thesis,a three-month teaching experiment is conducted on 85 students from two classes of Grade 11 in Jiaozhou No.3 Middle School in Qingdao,Shandong Province.Content-based Instruction is conducted in the experimental class and traditional grammar-translation method is carried out in the control class.The research uses two kinds of research instruments: test and interview.This research is to find out whether senior high school students’ subskills of speculating on the author’s view and attitude,deeply understanding the main idea,and inferring the meaning of words in English reading can be improved with Content-based Instruction.The data from the test is analyzed by SPSS 23.0,and six students in the experimental class are interviewed after the experiment.The results show that the application of Content-based Instruction can effectively improve senior high students’ the above three reading subskills.It is hoped that the results of this study can enrich the research of Content-based Instruction in senior high English reading,and have significance for students’ learning and teachers’ teaching of reading.