The Influence Of "Reading Circles" Teaching Method On Junior High School Students’ English Reading

Reading plays a pivotal role in English learning,and the cultivation of students’ reading competence has always been the key to English teaching.In recent years,educational scholars have been actively exploring effective reading teaching methods,among which the “Reading Circles” teaching method stands out and has gained wide attention and recognition from researchers.“Reading Circles”,also known as “Literature Circles”,is a method to instruct reading through independent reading,cooperative learning and sharing.The specific steps of this method are “reading-thinking-connecting-sharing-evaluating”.Unlike the traditional teaching methods,the “Reading Circles” emphasizes students as the main body,and teachers’ teaching focus shifts from indoctrinating knowledge to mobilizing and organizing students’ autonomous learning and discussion.This study tries to further apply the “Reading Circles” teaching method raised by Mark Furr to junior high school English reading teaching on the basis of cooperative learning theory and humanistic learning theory,aiming to probe into the following two research questions:(1)Can the application of “Reading Circles” teaching method effectively improve students’ reading comprehension?(2)What are the effects of the“Reading Circles” teaching method on students’ reading attitudes?To answer the above research questions,the researcher chose two parallel classes of the eighth grade of a junior high school in Zhenjiang as the research subjects and conducted experimental research for one semester using reading comprehension tests,questionnaires,and interviews as the research instruments.For the experimental class(Class 10),the teacher selected Good English 7 as the students’ extensive reading materials.The students in the experimental class have carried out “Reading Circles”activities once a week.However,in the control class(class 11),the teacher continued to adopt the conventional PWP teaching method to guide students to read.To ensure the reliability of the study results,the two classes differed only in the reading teaching methods;they were consistent in teaching hours and extensive reading materials and they were instructed by the same teacher.In addition,the researcher mainly adopted SPSS 25.0 to quantitatively analyze various data collected in the teaching experiment,thus providing an objective basis for drawing conclusions from the study.Based on the experimental study and data analysis,the following major findings are obtained:(1)After the experiment,there was a significant difference between the experimental class and the control class in English reading comprehension,and the mean score of students in the experimental class was higher than that in the control class,which indicated that the application of the “Reading Circles” teaching method can effectively improve students’ reading comprehension;(2)The “Reading Circles”teaching method has a positive influence on students’ reading attitudes.The survey results confirm that after a semester of “Reading Circles” teaching,students’ reading attitudes have changed positively in the emotional and behavioral dimensions.According to the findings of this study,the researcher also puts forward several suggestions for applying the “Reading Circles” teaching method in English reading teaching,hoping to provide some references for English teachers to carry out reading teaching and conduct related studies in the future.