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

National English Curriculum Standards for Regular Senior High School(2017)promotes inquiry learning in students’ English reading,so as to develop their thinking capacity,learning ability and communicative competence in reading teaching in senior high schools.However,in today’s high school English reading classrooms,many teachers are still using the traditional Grammar-Translation Method.In doing so,not only is the students’ deep understanding of the reading materials neglected,but it also leads students to a narrow path of only comprehending and translating words,sentence patterns and grammar,and fails to improve their communicative competence.It is not that the teachers are not well informed of the importance of Inquiry-based Instruction.They actually do not know how to apply it in the reading classes.Consequently,improving students’ sub-skills of reading with this teaching method still exists as a vision.To bridge up the gap between teachers’ practice and the requirements of the curriculum standards,relevant work has been done by high school English teaching researchers in defining inquiry-based learning,seeking its theoretical supports and establishing Inquiry-based Instruction modes.It is consented that Inquiry-based Instruction refers to a teaching method in which teachers create situations,guide students to ask questions,guide students to actively acquire knowledge,understand knowledge,and solve problems in a scientific way,so as to cultivate students’ inquiry,criticism,and autonomy.It is not only committed to cultivating students’ practical ability and innovative spirit.Researchers abroad and in China hold that Inquiry-based Instruction can generally improve students’ reading ability.Nevertheless,few researches are targeted at students’ sub-skills of reading.Thence,taking theoretical bases of Constructivist Learning Theory,Pragmatic Pedagogy,Subjectivity Education Theory and Zone of Proximal Development,the present study applies Inquiry-based Instruction in senior high school English reading teaching and explores its effect on improving students’ reading skills of seeking specific information,summarizing the gist and inferring.The 4-month experiment is conducted among 113 students from two classes of Grade 11 in Pingquan No.1Middle School in Hebei Province,Class 11 taken as experimental class and Class 12 as control class.The study aims to explore the effect of Inquiry-based Instruction on students’ English reading skills of seeking specific information,summarizing the gist and inferring.The reading questions selected from the 2019-2022 senior two final-term exam papers designed by Shijiazhuang Education Bureau are chosen as pre-test papers,which mainly involves three kinds of items about reading subskills: inferring,seeking specific information,and summarizing the gist.Question types of the pre-test papers are exactly the same as the National College Entrance Examination paper,which will be used and selected as post-test paper.In the process of the research,quantitative data are collected with pre-test and post-test papers,and qualitative data with an interview.Afterwards,the data are processed and analyzed with SPSS 23.0.It can be seen that the students in the experimental class have obvious better performance on dealing with reading questions of seeking specific information,summarizing the gist and inferring.Hence,it can be concluded that the research result shows a significant positive effect of Inquiry-based Instruction on improving students’ reading skills of seeking specific information,summarizing the gist and inferring.