An Experimental Study On Effects Of Project-based Learning On Students’ English Reading Experience In Senior High School

Professor Wang Qiang(2015)put forward the concept of “English reading literacy” and constructed a framework for primary and secondary school students.In the framework,English reading literacy consists of reading ability and reading character.And the reading character is further divided into reading habits and reading experience.English reading experience refers to the emotional outcome students obtain from reading and contains reading interest,reading attitude,and self-assessment.Reading experience is an important foundation for reading habits.Therefore,English reading teaching should not only develop students’ reading ability,but also focus on their reading experience.However,in the current high school English reading teaching,teachers generally use the traditional bottom-up teaching method.Students only accept the information and passively memorize vocabulary and grammar points,which easily makes students bored with reading.Therefore,the current high school English reading teaching is in urgent need of new teaching methods to improve students’ reading experience.Project-based Learning(PBL)can compensate for this shortcoming.It is an advanced teaching mode based on the interactional view of language and learning by doing theory.Under the appropriate guidance of teachers,students cooperate with their group members to produce the final creative product through careful planning,active questioning,and extensive reading.In this learning process,students learn in group cooperation and become masters of the classroom,changing from passive acceptance to active acquisition,which helps them improve learning experience,increase learning interest and develop a positive attitude towards English reading.According to the related studies,PBL are widely used and accepted by more and more teachers and students,but such a method is less adopted in high school English teaching in China.Additionally,because of the late attention to reading experience,domestic researches on it are far from enough,with few studies exploring the effects of PBL on students from the dimension of reading experience.Therefore,the author conducts a teaching experiment to study its effects on students’ English reading experience from three dimensions in senior high school and addresses the following three questions:(1)What is the effect of PBL on students’ English reading interest?(2)What is the effect of PBL on students’ English reading attitude?(3)What is the effect of PBL on students’ English reading self-assessment?In this study,both quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted.One hundred and thirty-five students from two parallel classes of Grade 10 in a senior high school in Xinji of Hebei Province are selected as the experimental subjects.The experiment lasts for about three months and questionnaires and interviews are the two types of research instruments in this study.During the pre-experiment phase,a pre-questionnaire is given to both experimental class and control class to learn their current reading situations;in the experiment,the experimental class adopts a PBL approach to English reading teaching,while the control class still uses the traditional PWP(pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading)teaching model;after the experiment,students in both experimental and control classes are required to take a post-questionnaire to compare differences of reading experience between the two classes.Meanwhile,twelve students at different levels from the experimental class are selected to take part in an interview.Questionnaire data are gathered and entered into the SPSS26.0 database for synthesis and analysis,and the interview findings are analyzed qualitatively.Through analyzing the results from questionnaires and interviews,it has been verified that the use of PBL in high school English reading teaching has been shown to be helpful in students’ reading experience,including reading interest,reading attitude and self-assessment.Therefore,it is recommended to conduct English reading teaching based on PBL so as to enhance students’ reading experience and cultivate their English reading literacy.