The Application Of "Reading Circles" Model To English Reading Teaching In High Schools

In recent years,the requirements of the "New College Entrance Examination" and the "New Class" have set off a wave of reform in the front-line teaching of English.The3,500 vocabulary,basic sentence patterns and simple thinking levels required by the previous college entrance exams are no longer sufficient to meet the demand for high level reading skills.Only by stimulating students’ motivation to learn autonomously and by deepening the depth of thought in the reading material with a student-centered classroom can we improve students’ reading ability and cultivate qualified language learners.The key to the new class is whether to implement the requirements of the core literacy of the English language.The English Curriculum Standards for General High Schools(2020 edition)states that in order to reflect the unity of the English curriculum’s instrumental and humanistic nature,students must develop their language skills,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability.Among them,the cultivation of learning ability is an important prerequisite for solving language barriers and enhancing cultural awareness.Autonomous learning ability is the most important part of learning ability,and it can be said the basis of all learning ability.Reading ability and autonomous learning ability are complementary to each other,how to improve these two important abilities through reading teaching? The "reading circles" model is not only an innovative method to effectively improve reading ability,but also a comprehensive training method to integrate listening,speaking,reading and writing ability,and a strategy to develop the ability to combine autonomous learning and cooperative investigation,The "reading circles" model has been widely used in language classes in primary and secondary schools abroad.Therefore,I choose the "reading circles" model in this study to investigate two questions: whether the application of this model helps to improve students’ reading ability and whether it is conducive to improving students’ autonomous learning ability.In this study,two parallel classes of high school,Class 3 and Class 4,were selected as subjects for a four-month study.The experimental class,Class 3,used the "reading circles" teaching model to teach the students in the experimental class by selecting the graded reading materials Bookworms club: stories for reading circles,Bookworms club silver(level 2-3),which matched the English level of the students in the experimental class.After four months,the students passed the reading test,and through the comparison of pre and post test results of reading test questions,pre and post test results of questionnaires and interview results,the results of this study showed that the experimental Class 3 had a significant improvement in both reading ability and autonomous learning ability than the control class Class 4.This indicates that the "reading circles" reading teaching model has a positive and significant effect on improving high school students’ English reading ability and high school students’ autonomous learning ability.Finally,the author reflects on the shortcomings of this study and provides suggestions and references on how to promote the development of students’ learning ability in the future in the light of the practice of using "reading circles" reading teaching.