A Study On Cultivation Of Junior High School Students’ Reading Character Based On English Graded Reading

In April 2022,China issued the new version of the Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standards(2022 edition)(CEECS),putting forward higher requirements on junior high school students’ reading performance in the aspects of reading variety,reading amount,etc..To meet these requirements,it is of vital importance to cultivate students’ reading character,a theoretical framework introduced by Wang Qiang in February,2015,to integrate readers’ characteristics from internal aspects to external aspects(2015),which includes reading attitude,reading interest,self-assessment,reading strategy,reading frequency and reading amount.However,in view of the fact that the current English reading teaching is to some extent confined to the thematically unrelated texts of textbook,lacking contexts from the real world and hard to arouse students’ interests(Wang,2017),it is necessary to introduce more motivated and diverse reading materials of different genres to stimulate students’ reading passion,and promote the cultivation of reading character.One promising solution is,according to CEECS,providing students with graded reading materials officially published at home and abroad.Based on corresponding literature review,the author conducted an empirical research on the effect of graded reading on learners’ reading character by using the official graded reading material Li Sheng Compass Graded Reading(Junior High School Edition Level 1 and Level 2)published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.In this research,the author tries to answer two questions: 1)What is the current state of junior high school students’ English reading character? 2)What effect does English Graded Reading have on junior high school students’ English reading character?The research lasted for four months in a class from grade seven in a public high school in Chongqing.The participants are 48 students in Class one.There were altogether three stages in the research.Before the experiment,the author asked the participants to complete a questionnaire with the purpose of finding out the status quo of their reading character.During the experiment,the author conducted classroom observation to record students’ involvement and performance in four graded reading classes at different stages of the experiment.In addition,the author collected students’ learning diaries after each graded reading class as the supplement to the quantitative data.After the experiment,the author asked the students to did the questionnaire again and conducted interviews with nine students in different reading levels to collect their perception on English Graded Reading.In the analysis stage,the author used SPSS software to analyze the pre-test and post-test results of the questionnaire survey,descriptively analyzed the classroom observation results and students’ learning diaries,and also transcribed the recorded interviews of students into texts for thematic analysis.Based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data,the author found that English Graded Reading helped improve students’ reading character significantly,especially in the aspects of reading interest,self-assessment and reading strategy.Due to some inevitable factors,this research still exists some limitations.First of all,the size of the sample and the experimental duration are relatively limited.Secondly,due to conditions limitations,this research compared the results of pre-test and post-test of the same sample instead of setting a control group,so that the research results may not be absolutely representative.Therefore,future research on reading character should set up experimental class and control class to increase the reliability and validity of the experiment.In addition,since the cultivation of students’ reading character is a long-term task,future research can conduct relatively long-term experiments on a large-capacity sample in order to draw more effective and significant conclusions.