The Effect Of Sustained Silent Reading On Senior High Students’ Reading Comprehension

Reading plays an important role in second language acquisition.It is one of the four major language skills that students must master.It is also an important means for students to obtain information and input language.In addition,reading is also the key item in the College Entrance Examination English Test Paper,which has the characteristics of significant score weight and clear distinction.However,in the regular English reading teaching,students’ reading materials are assigned and the English reading mode is limited to text reading and exam-oriented reading.In recent studies,there have been more and more discussions on the importance of English reading,such as carrying out reading activities in and out of class,changing students’ reading attitude,improving their reading ability and so on.Among them,the concept of Sustained Silent Reading holds that through continuous,free and sufficient reading,students can develop good reading habits and improve their reading ability.Therefore,this study takes Sustained Silent Reading as an extra-curricular reading mode and gives students the freedom to choose reading materials by themselves to conduct experiment,answering the following two research questions:(1)What effects does sustained silent reading have on students’ reading attitudes in senior high school?(2)What effects does sustained silent reading have on students’ reading comprehension in senior high school ?In this experiment,Class 4,Grade 2,and Class 5,Grade 2,from Dong Fang Hong Senior High School,Ding Xi City,are selected as the experimental class and the control class respectively,with 40 students in each class.Before and after the experiment,the researcher used the Estes Reading Attitude Scale to detect the change of students’ Reading attitudes and used the pretest and the post test to check the change of reading comprehension achievement.Through the analysis of the college entrance examination papers in Gan Su province in recent years,this study divided the reading comprehension questions into four kinds of reading comprehension questions: main idea,detailed information,new word meaning guessing and reasoning judgment,then compared each type of questions respectively before and after experiment.The students in the two classes had the same English level.During the four-month experiment,the students in the experimental class conduct Sustained Silent Reading in four stages.The reading mode of the students in the control class was exam-oriented reading,and the two classes had the same reading period every day.The data obtained in the experiment were analyzed by SPSS22.0.Through the analysis of experimental data and results of questionnaires,the following conclusion are drawn:(1)Sustained Silent Reading can change students’ reading attitudes.(2)Sustained Silent Reading can improve students’ reading comprehension achievement.In the post test,the average scores of the experimental class were higher than those of the control class in main idea questions,reasoning and judgement questions and new word meaning guessing questions.But scores on detailed information questions did not improve significantly.