A Study On Activity Designs For Senior High School English Reading Teaching From The Perspective Of Activity-based Approach To English Learning

English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School(2017 edition and revised in2020)advocates that teachers should practice the activity-based approach to English learning to develop students’ key competencies ability effectively.Cultivating students’ English key competencies in reading teaching is very important,but there are also many problems in the current reading teaching of English.For instance,it pays too much attention to teaching words and sentences and simply trains the reading skills,and lacks the cultivation of students’ thinking qualities,such as the critical and innovative abilities.Then,it is imperative to design reasonable and efficient teaching activities to realize teaching goals which is worthy of continuous in-depth study.The activity-based approach to English learning combines content with activities,using learning and understanding,applying and practicing,transferring and creating activities to promote the integration and development of students’ language,thinking and culture.The author is committed to exploring the influence of the activity-based approach to English learning on the activity designs for senior high school English reading teaching and wants to help teachers to design teaching activities better.This study aims to study the following questions:(1)Do the reading teaching activities designed and implemented by senior high school English teachers of different stages meet the requirements of the activity-based approach?(2)What are the difficulties that senior high school English teachers may encounter in designing reading teaching activities that meet the requirements of the activity-based approach?Based on constructivist learning theory and discourse analysis theory,this study uses teaching design content analysis,classroom observation and interview to study the designs of reading teaching activities of six English teachers at three different stages in a key middle school in Nanning.First of all,by observing the classrooms of different stages of teachers and analyzing the activities in reading teaching designs,this paper discusses the situation of reading teaching activities design under the activity-based approach.Then,by interviewing teachers,we hope to find out the difficulties they may encounter and the support and help they need when teachers designing reading teaching activities that meet the requirements of the activity-based approach.The result shows that the reading teaching activities design of different stages of English teachers reflects the requirements of the activity-based approach to a certain extent,but there are also some differences.The reading teaching activity design of teachers with long teaching years is better in line with the connotations of the activity-based approach.It is closely related to their understanding of the activity-based approach.However,there is still a distance between the reading teaching activities design of teachers with short teaching years and the requirements of the activity-based approach,the reason for which is that the activities they design and implement focus on developing students’ language knowledge and skills,which is because their own inadequate understanding of the activity-based approach and insufficient teaching experience.Teachers all basically designed the learning and understanding activities,and they have difficulty in designing applying and practicing activities as well as transferring and creating activities.Teachers with long teaching years tend to attribute the difficulties to external elements,such as students’ knowledge level and time.The teacher with short teaching years tends to attribute the difficulties to their own professional knowledge literacy.Finally,based on the above findings,this study provides three implications for senior high school English reading teaching activity design: interpret the text fully and design reading activities around the thematic meaning;avoid excessive expansion of the theme of the text;raise the reading questions carefully to develop students’ advanced thinking.